A Novel Planar 3-DOF Hard-Soft Haptic Teleoperator

Abstract

A novel planar 3-degree of freedom (DOF) haptic teleoperator based on the "hard-soft" principle is presented. The mechatronic concept of using a stiff master and a compliant slave has previously been shown to improve haptic teleoperation performance in 1-dof teleoperation, and the concept can now be experimentally verified for more realistic tasks. The master device consists of a stiff double-rhomb force-redundant parallel robot and the slave device is a serial robot with flexible joints. Identification experiments show that the teleoperation setup can achieve high stiffness (>1.5 N/mm)for the master side and low stiffness on the slave side (0.100 N/mm)