BILATERAL CONTROL OF THE MASTER SLAVE MANIPULATOR SYSTEM

A bilateral remote control has been developed to allow an operator to control a robot at a remote site by using force sensor data. A 6 d.o.f. kinematically dissimilar master slave manipulator system was controlled by the bilateral remote control. The master manipulator was constructed using a 3 d.o.f. pantograph link mechanism and a 3 d.o.f. gimbal mechanism at the tip of the link mechanism. Each joint was driven by a direct drive motor so that the force generated by the task could be fed back to the operator. A PUMA 660 was used for the slave manipulator and included a one d.o.f pneumatic gripper with a force torque sensor at its wrist. The slave manipulator was controlled by a micro computer with two dedicated coprocessor (DSP and Transputer). The DSP was used for processing the force torque sensor data. The Transputer was used for the inverse kinematics calculation. These coprocessors were connected to the micro computer through a by directional memory. Each controller of the master and the slave manipulator was connected by an Ethernet with 10Mbps capacity. By using this system, the opening of a beer bottle cap, which is a difficult task to do without force sensing, was demonstrated.