Context
Teleoperation systems with haptic feedback can be used to accomplish tasks requiring human levels of dexterity over long distances. Fields like disaster relief and remote care stand to benefit significantly from systems capable of performing such tasks. However, time delay in communication between operator and telerobot make controlling such systems a difficult task. Traditional approaches involving sending power variables such as velocity and force over communication channels result in stability problems for the system. Methods to mitigate this directly exist, but they trade off stability problems for performance problems. Alternatively, Model-Mediated Teleoperation (MMT) sends information about operator motion to the telerobot, and the telerobot sends a model (or a parametrisation thereof) of the environment back to the operator, which can be used to reconstruct interaction force for haptic feedback. Such systems are stable and perform well provided the model is sufficiently descriptive and it does not change with time.
Problem
Many Model-Mediated Teleoperation systems present in literature often treat interaction between telerobot and environment as an interaction at a specific point. However, especially when manipulating objects, dexterous interaction, for humans, involves the use of hands, which interact with the environment at many different points. The hypothesis behind this assignment is that most objects that humans interact with in day-to-day life are such that the object dynamics can be separated into flexible (contact) dynamics and inertial dynamics. Furthermore, the flexible dynamics should be identifiable with a gripper, and the inertial dynamics should be identifiable using motion and force data from the end-effector on which the gripper is mounted. This assignment focuses on proving or disproving this hypothesis.
Practically, this will involve:
- Investigating the importance of various parasitic dynamics involved in the gripping estimation
- Designing an estimation technique for estimating inertial and contact dynamics of an object using a gripper and taking into account any identified parasitic dynamics
- Validating the method through experiments