Automatic identification of local geometric properties during teleoperation

During teleoperation, a human operator often receives only 2D visual feedback from the remote environment. While a variety of kinematic sensors exist on the remote manipulator for control purposes, the information inherent in these signals is rarely extracted and presented to the operator in a useful form. This paper investigates the extraction of such information through the development of an algorithm that estimates the geometric properties of a manipulated object and its environment using the remote robot sensors and knowledge of the task being performed. The focus of the paper is the development of contact constraint equations parametrized by the desired geometric properties and the automatic segmentation of the data stream according to the set of active contacts. The approach is validated for 3D peg-in-hole insertion using a desktop teleoperator system.