Some tasks are best executed by humans, but it might be impractical or dangerous for a human to be physically present. To still allow the human and their skills to effectively execute such a task, robotic telemanipulation setups can be used. From a safe site, a human operator manipulates a robot arm, which triggers another robot arm at the (unsafe/distant) remote site to move accordingly. The aim of telemanipulation setups is to make a user feel like they are interacting directly with the remote environment, i.e. have full transparency.
For the human user, force feedback from interaction between the remote robot and the environment is essential to achieve high transparency. However, users often feel more than just the desired interaction forces, such as i. internal dynamics of the remote robot (joint friction, link inertia), ii. forces induced by timing mismatches between the remote and operator robot’s controllers, or iii. artificial damping introduced to keep the system passive and stable. These undesired interaction forces impede the user’s ability to differentiate task-related interaction forces, resulting in degraded task performance.
This project aims to reduce undesired force reflection from the remote system to the user in a passivity-based bilateral telemanipulation setup.