A Human-Robot Shared Control in Single-Master Multi-Slave Tele-Micromanipulation System

Abstract

Our approach toward the advanced tele- micromanipulation is developing the single-master multi-slave tele-micromanipulation system based-on the shared control framework. A single-master(PHANToM haptic device) and multi-slaves(6 D.O.F parallel manipulator) configuration in- troduces a mapping problem which can be serious for some cooperative manipulations. The position/force virtual mapping method is implemented in the single-master dual-slave environ- ment to realize the human-robot shared internal force control framework while grasping task. A pick-and-place experiment proves the improvement of internal force regulation by the proposed shared control framework in single-master multi-slave tele-micromanipulation system. I. INTRODUCTION There are two main approaches to develop an advanced control framework for telemanipulation: supervisory control and shared control. However, the strict supervisory control is hard to realize with the current AI(Artificial Intelligence) technology. In less strict forms, a shared control frame- work(Figure 1) has been explored. Griffin et.al(1) proposed the human-robot shared control based master/slave testbed for stably grasping a fragile object. A shared control framework is proved to improve the stability of grasping a fragile object by several experiments. NASA's robonaut project(2) is also based on the shared control scheme by sharing the human and robot's low-level control such as grasping force while the operation by human. However, these approaches are assumed as having the same number of physical master/slave agents are being coupled. In the meanwhile, the more dexterous tele- micromanipulation application is getting to be required as the highly developing microsystem assembly. Also, the rapid improvement of middleware technologies which assures the network connectivity of multiple robot agents accelerates the implementation of it. As being described in the work of Kosuge et.al(3), the more dexterous but providing the easier human-machine interface is the desire of the current technology. This paper proposes the SMMS(single-master multi-slave) tele-micromanipulation system as the testbed for the shared control framework. To allow more dexterity in the slave while maintaining the human's operability, the SMMS tele-micromanipulation system(4) is proposed in this paper.