Liberating Humanity from Heavy Labor: Dual-Arm Coordination and Teleoperation Control for an Assistive Robot

Abstract

With the increasing demand for smart assistive robotics, the interaction between robots and humans, as well as the interaction within robots themselves, have become increasingly important in human-robot collaboration. However, conventional autonomous robot control strategy struggles to flexibly adapt to dynamic and unstructured surroundings, such as household and medical environments. This paper proposes a dual-arm coordination control strategy based on admittance control, targeting work scenarios that require direct human involvement, to free human labor. The dual-arm robot is divided into master and slave arms, to play different roles during human-robot collaboration. The master arm is directly controlled by the operator through teleoperation and shares motion information. The slave arm, equipped with a force sensor at its end-effector, maintains the contact force with the object in the required directions through the admittance control algorithm and traces the trajectory of the master arm in other directions. Finally, an object-handling task for dual-arm is conducted to verify the feasibility of the proposed strategy. The results demonstrate the dual-arm coordination control strategy exhibits excellent maneuverability.