Design and Development of a Teleoperated Telepresence Robot System With High-Fidelity Haptic Feedback Assistance

This paper proposes a new teleoperated telepresence robot system with high-fidelity haptic feedback for interaction work, such as pre-operation of explosive ordnance disposal (EOD). The system includes a master device and a slave collaborative robot. The master device enables the human operator to feel the operation procedure when performing the environmental interaction task. The system’s kinematics and dynamics models are derived, laying the foundation for the control scheme design. To meet the requirements of EOD missions, a hybrid motion mapping method including position-velocity (PV) and position-position (PP) mapping modes is presented to achieve a balance between working efficiency and manipulation accuracy. A hybrid haptic force rendering method is introduced to facilitate the human’s feeling of the interacting force and control the slave robot in PP and PV mapping modes, respectively. Experimental results reveal that the developed system exhibits good position and velocity tracking performance with root-mean-square (RMS) errors of 0.004 m and 0.007 m/s, respectively. The haptic tracking is realized with an RMS force error of 0.14 N. Moreover, the developed system can improve the EOD working efficiency by 10.7% with accurate operation while ensuring the fidelity of the haptic feedback to feel the contact process. The reported telepresence robot system provides a promising solution to delicate remote interaction operations.
Note to Practitioners
—Teleoperated robotic systems are commonly utilized to perform hazardous tasks such as EOD tasks. However, the existing EOD robots controlled by the joystick have limited dexterity. Moreover, visual feedback alone cannot provide enough telepresence for an operator, which leads to low efficiency. This paper proposes a new teleoperated robot system with high-fidelity haptic feedback assistance intended for EOD tasks. The system integrates the motion mapping method that combines PP and PV modes to improve the working efficiency while maintaining manipulation accuracy. The haptic sensations feedback can switch the rendering mode according to different control modes. The haptic feedback mechanism enables the operators to feel reliable contact under PP mapping mode and ensures safety and stability under PV mapping mode. Performance testing and application experiment verified the feasibility of the reported robotic system.