Fine Manipulation and Dynamic Interaction in Haptic Teleoperation
This work addresses remote robot operation challenges for hazardous environments, but it is incremental as it builds on an existing controller.
The paper tackles the problem of communication delays in haptic teleoperation by integrating postural optimization into a Fractal Impedance Controller, improving dynamic interactions and robustness, with experimental validation showing stability even under abrupt communication interruptions.
The teleoperation of robots enables remote intervention in distant and dangerous tasks without putting the operator in harm's way. However, remote operation faces fundamental challenges due to limits in communication delays. The proposed work improves the performances of teleoperation architecture based on Fractal Impedance Controller (FIC) by integrating into the haptic teleoperation pipeline a postural optimisation that also accounts for the replica robots' physical limitations. This update improves dynamic interactions by trading off tracking accuracy to maintain the system within its power limits. Thus, allowing fine manipulation without renouncing the robustness of the FIC controller. Additionally, the proposed method allows an online trade-off between tracking the autonomous trajectory and executing the teleoperated command, allowing their safe superimposition. The validated experimental results show that the proposed method is robust to increased communication delays. Moreover, we demonstrated that the remote teleoperated robot remains stable and safe to interact with, even when the communication with the master side is abruptly interrupted. with, even when the communication with the master side is abruptly interrupted.