Integrating measured force feedback in passive multilateral teleoperation

Abstract

In teleoperation systems, the master robot receives force feedback from the remote slave side. Thus, the human operator can perceive the contact between the slave robot and its environment. Application of a force sensor at the slave robot improves the performance of the telepresence system in terms of transparency. Still, so far no approach allowing measured force feedback in time delayed multilateral systems that allow the interaction of multiple agents can be found in literature. To this end, this paper presents a multilateral setup with passive measured force feedback based on the time domain passivity approach. Besides this solution to measured force feedback in multilateral systems, the presented approach promises improvements compared to other time invariant and model based approaches for measured force feedback also when applied to bilateral systems. Experiments are presented to allow for a performance analysis of the proposed system design.