Force Sensations of Delayed Telerobotic System with Kalman Filter

The transparency of a telerobotic system indicates a measure of how the human feels the remote system. Haptic perception plays a very important role in improving such system transparency. It enables the operator to feel the environment properties, evaluate object structures, and allow him/her to commit appropriate force control actions for safe manipulation. However, the typical approach to acquire remote contact forces is attaching force sensors on slave robot tip. This complicates system structure, makes delayed system unstable and makes the tool bulky. This paper presents formulation and application of an estimation approach based on Kalman filter for control of master slave robots contacting with unknown environment. A Kalman filter based estimator has been designed to estimate the driving current and rotation speed of the joint actuator. The feasibility of using motor current to estimate tool-environment contact forces is explored. Experimental results are presented, which demonstrate stable behavior of the telerobotic system with communication delay contact with remote environment.