Human-oriented control for haptic teleoperation

Haptic teleoperation enables the human to perform manipulation tasks in distant, scaled, hazardous, or inaccessible environments. The human closes the control loop sending haptic command signals to and receiving haptic feedback signals from the remote teleoperator. The main research question is how to design the control such that human decision making and action is supported in the best possible way while ensuring robust operation of the system. The human in the loop induces two major challenges for control design: 1) the dynamics of the human operator and the teleoperation system are tightly coupled, i.e., stability of the overall system is affected by the human operator dynamics; and 2) the performance of the teleoperation system is subjectively evaluated by the human, which typically means that standard control performance metrics are not suitable. This paper discusses recent control design successes in the area of haptic teleoperation. In particular, the importance and need of dynamic human haptic closed-loop behavior models and human perception models for the further improvement of haptic teleoperation systems is highlighted and discussed for real-world problem domains.