Unified approach for teleoperation of virtual and real environment for skill based teleoperation

Abstract

This paper proposes an alternative control scheme for a teleoperation system which consists of a master arm, a slave arm and a virtual environment. For a given task, the operator manipulates a virtual environment and executes the task, a skill for the task is extracted through the manipulation, and the skill is transferred to the remote site to execute the task in real. First, the authors consider the design of a control algorithm for a master arm manipulating the virtual environment so that the system has a given dynamics for the operator and the environment. Then the authors consider the design of a control algorithm for the master-slave system manipulating the real environment so that the system has the same dynamics given to the manipulator of the virtual environment. By designing a control scheme, with which the master arm with a real environment and the master arm with a virtual environment have the same dynamics, the skill extracted from the operation of the virtual environment would be applied to the real task using the slave arm. The proposed control system is applied to an experimental master-slave manipulator and experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of the system.