Enhancement of multi-user teleoperation systems by prediction of dyadic haptic interaction

Abstract

By integrating a model of the remote environment or the human operator into a haptic bilateral teleoperation control architecture, their behavior can be predicted to compensate time delay introduced by a non-ideal communication channel. This results in increased robustness and fidelity of the closed-loop system. In literature, models of the remote environment, the teleoperator dynamics or task-specific operator models are integrated into single-user teleoperation systems. The present paper is the first that explicitly considers dyadic haptic interaction between two operators in the prediction algorithms applied to a multi-user teleoperation system. Our comparative experimental results obtained in a 3 degree-of-freedom teleoperation system show an increased robustness and fidelity of this approach compared to a classic bilateral force-force architecture.