A Kinematic Control Framework for Single-Slave Asymmetric Teleoperation Systems

This paper is concerned with asymmetrical teleoperation, where the master/slave subsystems have different degrees of mobility. In particular, dual-master trilateral control of a possibly kinematically redundant slave robot (KRSR) and single-master control of a kinematically deficient slave robot (KDSR) are considered. In the case of a KDSR, the motion of the master robot is restricted to the natural motion constraint of the slave robot. Trilateral teleoperation is achieved via two master devices, each controlling a dedicated frame that is assigned on the slave robot. A novel control framework is presented that accomplishes two objectives: 1) motion and force tracking of the master and slave robots within their nonconstrained task spaces and 2) constrained master robot(s) motion that reflects the slave natural constraint (KDSR) or the kinematic constraint on each of the slave taskspace control frames (trilateral teleoperation). The proposed adaptive controller utilizes projection and generalized pseudoinverse matrices to achieve the stated teleoperation objectives. Stability and transparency of the asymmetric teleoperation system are demonstrated analytically and experimentally.