<title>Shared control in bilateral telerobotic systems</title>

Abstract

The paper describes the implementation of shared control in a force reflecting telerobotic system which has been carried out during the EC TELEMAN project INGRID. The experimental facility which has been developed at Newcastle comprises a Puma 762 robot which can be manually teleoperated by a Puma 260 robot, functioning as a generalized bilateral (or force reflecting) controller. The slave robot has been configured to support several autonomous force controlled tasks, which have been developed specifically for repair and maintenance operations in nuclear and/or other hazardous environments. The control architecture is based on a network of parallel processors, and the man-machine interface provides `soft-switching' of any axis to facilitate mixed mode and shared control which can be configured in both teleoperator and task based modes. A graphic display is also included to provide a visual indication of the magnitude of forces/torques exerted at the tool/environment interface.