Fine Manipulation and Dynamic Interaction in Haptic Teleoperation

Teleoperation of robots enables remote intervention in distant and dangerous tasks without putting the operator in harm's way. However, remote operation faces fundamental challenges due to limits in communication delay and bandwidth. The proposed work improves the performances of teleoperation architecture based on Fractal Impedance Controller (FIC), by integrating the most recent manipulation architecture in the haptic teleoperation pipeline. The updated controller takes advantage of the inverse kinematics optimisation in the manipulation, and hence improves dynamic interactions during fine manipulation without renouncing the robustness of the FIC controller. Additionally, the proposed method allows an online trade-off between the manipulation controller and the teleoperated behaviour, allowing a safe superimposition of these two behaviours. The validated experimental results show that the proposed method is robust to reduced communication bandwidth and delays. Moreover, we demonstrated that the remote teleoperated robot remains stable and safe to interact with, even when the communication with the master side is abruptly interrupted.