Peg-in-a-hole by haptic teleoperation

Abstract

This paper presents the experimental study on the application of the peg-in-a-hole task in the proposed haptic teleoperation system. Motion references from the user towards the remote manipulator and force feedback signals from the remote environment towards the user are transmitted through a virtual reality layer where the remote operation is simulated in real-tme. Various physical interactions occuring in the bilatral loop are modelled and controlled through the introduction of virtual spring-damper elements. Modeling and controller design of the teleoperation system is made modular and straightforward with the use of identical virtual dynamics. The design approach combines the introduction of the middle layer of virtual reality and modeling of all interactons by identical virtual spring-dampers. The haptic teleoperation system is experimentally evaluated with experienced and unexperienced users in the bilateral loop. Experimental results show that stable peg-in-a-hole operation is achieved in presence of bounded time-delays in all communication channels between the user, virtual reality layer and remote environment. Improvements of the teleoperation performances in terms of position tracking and total operation time are also observed in experiments.