A Predictive Display With Force Feedback And Its Application To Remote Manipulation System With Transmission Time Delay

Abstract

This paper discusses the design of a predictive display system with force feedback and its application to a remote manipulation system with transmission time delay. In the field of telerobotics, it has been found that an operator's performance is enhanced by the ability to obtain the information of remote environment with high fidelity. However, the transmission time delay produces one of the most crucial problems in space telerobotics. It is not practical to feed back force data continuously to the operator's hands because the delayed feedback may cause instability. In order to improve the manipulability, a system that presents the information of environments pre- cisely to the operator without time delay is re- quired. In this paper, a method for virtual genera- tion of the constraining forces in the model world is proposed. As a first step, a simple robot and its environment model are constructed. It is assumed that the environment model consists of several polyhedral objects without friction on the surface and that the slave robot is a point object. The spring effects are assumed at the surface of the ob- jects and then the constraining forces are produced in the direction normal to the surface, and those magnitudes are in proportion to the amount of the penetrations. A predictive display remote manipu- lation system with a force generation function is implemented. Some experiments were performed to confirm the effectiveness of the proposed method.