Single Master Bimanual Teleoperation System With Efficient Regulation

Abstract

This article proposes a new single master bimanual teleoperation system with an efficient position, orientation, and force regulation strategy. Unlike many existing studies that solely support motion synchronization, the first contribution of the proposed work is to propose a solution for orientation regulation when several slave robots have differing motions. In other words, we propose a solution for self-regulated orientation for dual-arm robots. A second contribution in the article allows the master with fewer degrees of freedom (DoF) to control the slaves (with higher DoF), while the orientation of the slaves is self-regulated. The system further offers a novel force regulation that enables the slave robots to have a smooth and balanced robot-environment interaction with proper force directions. Finally, the proposed approach provides adequate force feedback about the environment to the operator and assists the operator in identifying different motion situations of the slaves. Our approach demonstrates that the forces from the slaves will not interrupt the operator's perception of the environment. To validate the proposed system, experiments are conducted using a platform consisting of two 7-DoF slave robots and one 3-DoF master haptic device. The experiments demonstrated good results in terms of position, orientation, and force regulation.