Bilateral human-in-the-loop tele-haptic interface for controlling a robotic manipulator

Abstract

Effective human-robot interaction is a factor deemed necessary for control of industrial robots and manipulators. Fine manual control and calibration tasks for an industrial manipulator can be daunting for human operators. In this paper, the authors proposed a bilateral haptic interface for controlling a robotic manipulator using a haptic device. This allows the human operator to intuitively jog and fell the manipulator from a remote station. The proposed system consists of slave robot manipulators controlled by the master haptic devices that can give haptic feedback to the user when the slave robot touches rigid and deformable surfaces. Such a human-in-the-loop approach to control a remote robotic system offers a pragmatic solution when the robotic system is operating under dynamically changing environments and dexterous tasks. The inclusion of haptic feedback offers the potential to augment the operators' control task and overcome the limitations of visual perception within the robots operating environment.