Haptic aids for bilateral teleoperators

Abstract

Teleoperation of robotic tasks is usually performed in the Cartesian space due to the kinematic differences between the master and the slave. This entails several requirements, like the definition of a proper mapping between workspaces, the need to avoid collisions of the teleoperated robot with the environment, and the use of the inverse kinematics and of a procedure to correctly manage the passing through singularities. Within a bilateral teleoperation framework to teleoperate an industrial robot with a desktop haptic device, the present work proposes a guiding system based on path planning techniques to cope with these issues. The proposed system also includes a reactive behavior to cope with the potential collisions with obstacles. Teleoperation tests on virtual and real scenarios are included to validate the approach.