Contents I. Introduction
Recently, remote robot control systems with force feedback have been used in various fields such as remote surgery and remote education. It is possible to transmit the information about the shape, weight, and texture of an object, the movement of human hand, and so on by using force feedback. Therefore, by transmitting information about the force through a network, it is expected that the efficiency and accuracy of work performed remotely can largely be improved. The remote control with force feedback is studied in [1] and [2], where Shimada et al. treat work of writing characters by operating a haptic interface device under a virtual environment that models the slave terminal. The master terminal calculates the reaction force and sends the information about the position based on the reaction force to an industrial robot at the slave terminal. Then, the industrial robot arm moves to the position. However, because the reaction force from the slave terminal is not returned, we cannot necessarily feel the reaction force precisely. Also, the influence of the network delay between the master and slave terminals is not investigated. In [2], Horie et al. operate a haptic interface device at the master terminal under a virtual environment that models the industrial robot of the slave terminal, and the reaction force is generated at the master terminal. In this case, although they use the information of the reaction force from the slave terminal, they do not investigate on the influence of network delay.
