Psychophysical Evaluation of Control Scheme Designed for Optimal Kinesthetic Perception in Scaled Teleoperation

This paper focuses on psychophysical evaluation of the control scheme developed to optimize the kinesthetic perception during the scaled teleoperation. The control problem is formulated as a multi-objective constrained optimization. The objective function is a metric which quantifies the detection and discrimination capacity of the human operator. The constraints are position tracking accuracy and absolute stability of the scaled teleoperation. Two popular control architectures, i.e., the position-position and the force-position control architectures are considered in this paper. The method of limits is employed in this paper to conduct the psychophysical experiments and evaluation. Results show that the developed control scheme is more effective in increasing the detection and discrimination capacity of human subjects as compared to the traditional transparency-optimized control laws

Kinesthetic Haptics Sensing and Discovery with Bilateral Teleoperation Systems

In the mechanical engineering field of robotics, bilateral teleoperation is a classic but still increasing research topic. In bilateral teleoperation, a human operator moves the master manipulator, and a slave manipulator is controlled to follow the motion of the master in a remote, potentially hostile environment. This dissertation focuses on kinesthetic perception analysis in teleoperation systems. Design of the controllers of the systems is studied as the influential factor of this issue. The controllers that can provide different force tracking capability are compared using the same experimental protocol. A 6 DOF teleoperation system is configured as the system testbed. An innovative master manipulator is developed and a 7 DOF redundant manipulator is used as the slave robot. A singularity avoidance inverse kinematics algorithm is developed to resolve the redundancy of the slave manipulator. An experimental protocol is addressed and three dynamics attributes related to kineshtetic feedback are investigated: weight, center of gravity and inertia. The results support our hypothesis: the controller that can bring a better force feedback can improve the performance in the experiments