Multicontact Bilateral Telemanipulation With Kinematic Asymmetries

We propose a novel bilateral telemanipulation framework to tame master and slave devices having different structures. This condition applies to multicontact teleoperation scenarios where the number of contact points on the slave side and the number of interaction points on the master side are different. An example is a master device interacting with the thumb and the index fingertips of the human operator, and as slave device, a robotic arm with a multifingered robotic hand. In case of a manipulation task, it is not straightforward to transmit motion commands and reflect forces from the interaction with the environment. A general telemanipulation framework, that does not consider the specific kinematics of the devices involved, is needed. The main idea of this study is to take advantage of a virtual object as a mediator between the master and slave side. The arising forward and backward mapping algorithms are able to relate the motions and the exerted forces of very dissimilar systems. The approach has been evaluated in a case study consisting of two haptic interfaces used both to track the index and thumb motions and to render forces on the master side and a robotic arm with a multifingered hand as end effector on the slave side. The results presented in this paper can be extended to cooperative grasping scenarios where multiple robots telemanipulate the same object.