Robust High-Transparency Haptic Exploration for Dexterous Telemanipulation
This work addresses robust telemanipulation for remote or hazardous environments like planetary exploration, offering an incremental improvement in controller design.
The paper tackled the problem of robotic teleoperation in challenging conditions by proposing a passive Fractal Impedance Controller, which achieved higher transparency and superior dexterity compared to traditional methods, with stable performance under extreme delays up to 1 s and low bandwidths of 10 Hz.
Robotic teleoperation will allow us to perform complex manipulation tasks in dangerous or remote environments, such as needed for planetary exploration or nuclear decommissioning. This work proposes a novel telemanipulation architecture using a passive Fractal Impedance Controller (FIC), which does not depend upon an active viscous component for stability guarantees. Compared to a traditional impedance controller in ideal conditions (no delays and maximum communication bandwidth), our proposed method yields higher transparency in interaction and demonstrates superior dexterity and capability in our telemanipulation test scenarios. We also validate its performance with extreme delays up to 1 s and communication bandwidths as low as 10 Hz. All results validate a consistent stability when using the proposed controller in challenging conditions, regardless of operator expertise.