Cooperative manipulation between humans and teleoperated agents

2008

1989

Reflected-force feedback is an important aspect of teleoperations. Our objective is to determine the ability of the human operator to respond to that force. The present study simulates telerobotics 1.

1998

This paper investigates the use of arm-grounded force feedback applied to an operator's fingertips while performing telemanipulation tasks with a dexterous robot hand. The forces were applied by a cabledriven feedback device used in conjunction with an instrumented glove. Experiments were conducted to evaluate subjects' ability to discriminate between objects of different size and stiffness, and to regulate grasp forces. The results indicate that object size discrimination was comparable to using a conventional haptic feedback interface grounded to the environment, though still not as effective as direct human contact. The force regulation indicated that the user could maintain a fairly constant force, but was subject to some system noise. Discrimination of object stiffness was the most difficult task, due to the inherent compliances of the system and yielded a 75% success rate for distinguishing between compliant(150 N/m) and rigid objects.

2007

This paper proposes that there are ultimately only two topical tactile feedback generation modalities for haptic human interfaces which allow the human operator to handle either (i) temporary VR-based material replicas of the local geometric and/or force profile at the contact areas of an unlimited set of generic objects that could virtually be handled during the manipulation, or (ii) permanent material replicas of a limited set of typical objects. Examples of tactile human interfaces developed by the authors for telerobotic blind tactile exploration of objects, for telerobotic hapto-visual stylus-style tool manipulation are presented to illustrate the proposed approach. A NN architecture allowing for the modelling of the elastic properties of 3D objects from experimental tactile and range imaging data is also presented.

Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 2005

Shared control represents a middle ground between supervisory control and traditional bilateral control in which the remote system can exert control over some aspects of the task while the human operator maintains access to low-level forces and motions. In the case of dexterous telemanipulation, a natural approach is to share control of the object handling forces while giving the human operator direct access to remote tactile and force information at the slave fingertips. We describe a set of experiments designed to determine whether shared control can improve the ability of an operator to handle objects delicately and to determine what combinations of force, visual, and audio feedback provide the best level of performance and operator sense of presence. The results demonstrate the benefits of shared control and the need to carefully choose the types and methods of direct and indirect feedback.

Cutaneous haptic feedback can be used to enhance the performance of robotic teleoperation systems while guaranteeing their safety. Delivering ungrounded cutaneous cues to the human operator conveys in fact information about the forces exerted at the slave side and does not affect the stability of the control loop. In this work we analyze the feasibility, effectiveness, and implications of providing solely cutaneous feedback in robotic teleoperation. We carried out two peg-in-hole experiments, both in a virtual environment and in a real (teleoperated) environment. Two novel 3-degree-of-freedom fingertip cutaneous displays deliver a suitable amount of cutaneous feedback at the thumb and index fingers. Results assessed the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach. Cutaneous feedback was outperformed by full haptic feedback provided by grounded haptic interfaces, but it outperformed conditions providing no force feedback at all. Moreover, cutaneous feedback always kept the system stable, even in the presence of destabilizing factors such as communication delays and hard contacts.

Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, 2005

The problem of teleoperating a mobile robot using shared autonomy is addressed: an onboard controller performs close range obstacle avoidance while the operator uses the manipulandum of a haptic probe to designate the desired speed and rate of turn. Sensors on the robot are used to measure obstacle range information. A strategy to convert such range information into forces is described, which are reflected to the operator's hand via the haptic probe. This haptic information provides feedback to the operator in addition to imagery from a front-facing camera mounted on the mobile robot. Extensive experiments with a user population both in virtual and in real environments show that this added haptic feedback significantly improves operator performance, as well as presence, in several ways (reduced collisions, increased minimum distance between the robot and obstacles, etc.) without a significant increase in navigation time.

2014 Ieee Ras International Conference on Humanoid Robots, 2014

This work presents an enriched human-machine interface for performing effective tele-manipulation using a humanoid robot. To provide the slave with the ability to dexterously interact with the remote environment, we implement an autonomous impedance controller that regulates the slave's joints stiffness and damping according to the manipulation loading conditions. In the proposed strategy, freespace operations are performed with compliant limbs to ensure safe interactions during unforeseen collisions on the wholearm together with a soft behaviour at the initial phase of contact. During the manipulation task, the designed controller accounts for the arm configuration and the direction/amplitude of the external force sensed at the end-effector to stiffen the humanoid arm joints, permitting to handle the task loads. Experiments performed on the compliant humanoid robot COMAN demonstrate the effectiveness of this human-inspired impedance controller during a teleoperated pick-and-place task. The interaction forces during manipulation can destabilize the floating base humanoid robot. To address this concern we also investigate the operators ability to rely on a cutaneous feedback of the slave's balance state to adjust their teleoperation strategy when required so as to complete the task while maintaining the slave's balance. A comparative study shows that the proposed vibrotactile feedback allows for a proper recognition of the slave's drop of stability during interaction tasks and that the tactile guidance leads to enhanced teleoperation performances characterized by a significantly lower number of falls.

Journal of Robotics and Control (JRC), 2022

Humans put their own lives aside to save other human's life and perform risky and dangerous activities. The risk can be reduced by using new technologies. This research study focuses on telepresence and teleoperation systems with motion and force control systems that replace humans in hazardous workspaces. In telepresence, the system helps humans to visualize the environment in real-time. In teleoperation, the system provides sensation to assist human beings in performing out-of-reach and dangerous operations safely as in real, providing a shadow hand to the operator. In this study, a system is developed that consists of a slave robotic arm and a master wearable device with bidirectional communication between the robotic arm and operator (master wearable device). It also presents a gesture-controlled robotic arm that uses sensors to read and translate human arm movements as commands. The slave robotic arm, senses applied force on an object and a master wearable device develops the force according to sensed force, in a result operator senses/feels the same object in the control room at distance. The slave robotic arm also mimics the operator arm to reach the proper position of an object. Several experiments were conducted with untrained personnel and satisfactory results were yielded, which showed that the motion and force replication is 90-95% accurate.

Teleoperation systems are designed to allow their user(s) to perform manipulation tasks in a remote environment, usually in real-time. Application fields range from teleoperated micro-assembly, over minimally-invasive surgery, to large-scale assembly of heavy parts. Human work performance with modern teleoperation systems is hampered by two issues in particular: poor movement accuracy and excessive force application, both of which frequently result in handling errors, damage to equipment and slow work performance. Haptic interfaces, which transmit tactile information to the user of these systems, promise to address these problems. Is it sensible to exploit the sense of touch in the design of human-machine interfaces? This question seems certainly justified, considering that the development and construction of haptic interfaces usually translate into additional financial expenses, which cannot necessarily be recovered through higher retail or service prices. For industries employing teleoperated systems, it is therefore paramount to establish (1) whether haptic interfaces yield measurable advantages over conventional visual interfaces and, if they do, (2) how they are effectively designed and employed to optimise work performance. Yet, systematic, scientific investigations regarding tangible benefits of haptic interfaces for teleoperation systems are scarce, as current efforts are constrained by an atheoretical, fragmented and biased evidence base. As a result, transparent guidelines, which could advise system developers on the best use of haptic signals in teleoperation systems, are still lacking. The present work closely examines the principles of human-machine interaction with haptic interfaces, discusses previous research efforts and presents new evidence. Furthermore, a synthesis of empirical evidence is presented from which transparent guidelines for the design and effective use of haptic interfaces are derived. These are combined with previously established guidelines on the design of multi-modal interfaces in form of an interactive software package, the “HMI (Human-Machine Interface) Design Guide”. It is hoped that accessible and transparent interface design guidelines will encourage system developers to take more notice of basic principles of haptic human-machine interaction during the design and development process and thus promote interdisciplinary work in this field.