Towards teleoperated exploration of hazardous environments: Control and experimental study of kinematically dissimilar master-slave structure

This work addresses the manipulation and control problems of a teleoperated redundant manipulator, which is designed to work in dangerous, highly unstructured environments, like natural disasters or catastrophes. The main task is to clear and secure the way before the human rescuers enter the dangerous area. Remotely controlled telerobots are an appropriate solution for such scenarios. A recently developed 6 degrees of freedom (DOF) haptic input device is used as the master arm and an anthropomorphic, human sized 7 DOF manipulator as the slave arm. One of the problems studied here is the connection of two kinematically dissimilar devices working in a master-slave configuration with 6 DOF force feedback. Issues regarding stiffness control, transparency, and intuitiveness of teleoperation are discussed.