Dexterous Remote Manipulation by Means of a Teleoperation System

Humans are experts in manipulation and grasping tasks. However, several industrial tasks represent a risk to human operators, for instance, handling radioactive material or transporting heavy objects. Teleoperation robotic schemes extend human capabilities, but they are highly nonlinear systems. In this paper, we address the problem of dexterous remote manipulation by means of a unilateral heterogenous teleoperation scheme composed by a single-master and multiple-slave manipulators handling a rigid object. In order to achieve a stable grasp, a decentralized force/position controller with continuous and bounded input torques based on the Orthogonalization Principle and a second-order sliding mode control is proposed for the slave robots. In addition, a trajectory planning method based on holonomic constraints is proposed to control multiple-slave manipulators with a single-master device. Experimental results are presented to evaluate the performance of the proposed approach.