Advanced telerobotics: Dual-handed and mobile remote manipulation

This work presents an advanced dual-handed, mobile telerobotic system developed at the High-Fidelity Telepresence and Teleaction Research Centre, Munich, Germany. To the authors' best knowledge, it is the first attempt to integrate mobile and multi-robot strategies in one physical and logical framework. In order to exploit human manipulation capabilities, a high fidelity telemanipulation system was developed. It consists of two redundant human-scaled anthropomorphic telemanipulator arms controlled by two redundant haptic interfaces providing a large, convex workspace and force feedback in a wide range of human perception. To provide a multi modal immersion, the haptic modality is augmented by 3D visual and audio channels. The main research issues are the control of devices with dissimilar kinematics, redundancy resolution methods, and six DOF compliance control. To extend the accessible workspace in remote environments, mobile robots are used as transporting platform extending the functionality of both the input devices and the telerobot. Mechatronic design topics and experimental results of six degree of freedom telemanipulation tasks and mobile telemanipulation are presented. The motion compression concept is exploited to cover large remote environments on a relatively small local area. Finally, architectures for collaborative telemanipulation are classified and corresponding interaction schemes are discussed.