Development of Variable Scaling Teleoperation Framework for Improving Teleoperation Performance

Teleoperation systems have been used in various industrial field to extend abilities of operator. However, different characteristics between master device and slave robot, and limited information from a remote environment increase difficulties of teleoperation and the cognitive load of operators. In this study, we propose the user controlled variable scaling teleoperation framework to improve manipulation abilities for both contact and non-contact tasks. The proposed framework includes the position scaling mode, impedance scaling mode and unit process recognition system. The operator can modulate a position scale or impedance scale of slave robot in real-time. The scaling mode is switched between two scaling mode according to a result of the unit process recognition system. The unit process recognition system recognizes whether a current subtask is a contact task or non-contact task. Teleoperation experiments were performed to evaluate the proposed teleoperation framework. Contact force, task completion time, and NASA Task Load Index (NASA-TLX) were measured to evaluate the performance of operators. Using the proposed framework reduced the contact force, completion time and NASA-TLX score by 48.9%, 20.2% and 36.6%, respectively, compared to the fixed-scale teleoperation framework. Results of experiments show that the proposed framework improves manipulation abilities for both non-contact and contact tasks.