Asymmetric Bilateral Telerobotic System With Shared Autonomy Control

Abstract

The asymmetry in bilateral teleoperation, i.e., the differences of mechanical structures, sizes, and number of joints between the master and slave robots, can introduce kinematics redundancy and workspace inequality problems. In this article, a novel shared autonomy control strategy is proposed for handling the asymmetry of bilateral teleoperation, which has two main contributions. First, to deal with kinematics redundancy, the proposed strategy provides a self-regulation algorithm of orientation that allows the operator to solely use the master position command to simultaneously control the slave's position and orientation. Second, to deal with workspace inequality, the proposed strategy enables the slave's workspace to be dynamically tunable to adapt to various task spaces without influencing the smoothness of the robot's movement. The experiments on a platform consisting of a six-degree of freedom (DoF) UR10 robot and a 3-DoF haptic device are given to validate the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.