Force feedback haptic interface for bilateral teleoperation of robot manipulation

With the advancement of robot and artificial intelligence technologies, various robot platforms have been introduced to operate in environments where humans cannot easily access. However, imperfect artificial intelligence and ethical issues make it challenging to deploy fully automated robots in harsh environments on behalf of humans. As an alternative to full automation, a human-in-the-loop control system is commonly used to control the robot in the remote site. Bilateral teleoperation allows to deliver the haptic information from the robot in the distance to the human operator. In this study, we propose a novel haptic master arm mapping the human arm motion to the robot arm motion. The master arm has three degrees of freedom equipped with motors to provide the human operator with force feedback. The feedback force is computed based on the virtual spring and damper connecting the endpoints of the master arm and the robot arm. The three-dimensional force is proportional to the position and velocity differences between the two endpoints. The performance of the developed master arm was evaluated by using a robot manipulator in the simulator. The results show that the bilateral teleoperation by using the developed haptic device overperforms the unilateral teleoperation without force feedback in terms of task-space position control with a smaller position error. The results also show that with the developed haptic device the magnitude of the feedback force can be properly adjusted by reflecting the sizes and weights of the human and the robots.