Teleoperation performance with a kinematically redundant slave robot

This paper studies the effects of three methods of kinematic redundancy resolution on teleoperation performance with a redundant slave robot in telemanipulation. First, we derive three kinematic redundancy control modes expressing different trade-offs between kinetic energy, joint usage, and joint-limit avoiding To validate our algorithms, we perform simulations, autonomous robot tests, and teleoperation experiments. The trade-off between kinetic energy and joint-limit index is clearly shown in the autonomous test. For teleoperation, four tasks and seven indices are defined A three-degrees-of-freedom (DOF), pen-based master and a 5-DOF, mini-direct-drive robot are used with position-to-position control in Cartesian space. Tasks are x-, y-, and z-positioning and contact-force control giving 2-DOF kinematic redundancy in the slave robot. Overall, the inertia-weighted pseudo-inverse, proposed by Whitney in 1969, shows best performance, while the feast-square mode (using no inertial information) shows the worst performance.