Haptic Assisted Teleoperation Based on Virtual Fixture and Dynamic Modelling

Abstract

It is a difficult task to teleoperate a robot in a partially known or unstructured environment without any assistance. In this paper, a haptic assisted teleoperation system is discussed that provides virtual fixtures for motion guidance and haptic feedbacks for dynamic interaction. First, a novel virtual fixture generation method based on a point-set implicit surface was proposed in a point cloud augmented virtual environment for human operational guidance. A robot-centered potential force field model was applied to generate guidance virtual fixtures. The resultant forces generated from both forbidden region and guidance virtual fixtures were fed back in real time to the human operator through a haptic device. Second, a real-time dynamic modelling method was proposed to reconstruct contacts in the teleoperation system. For the reconstruction of dynamic properties, an adaptive forgetting factor recursive least-squares method was applied for real-time parameter estimation. With haptic assistance from the motion guidance force and the dynamic force feedback, human operators could efficiently achieve targets and complete interactive tasks. The experimental results show that the proposed methods are effective for robot teleoperation.