Bilateral Teleoperation System with Integrated Position/Force Impedance Control for Assembly Tasks

Abstract

This article investigates the realization of achieving safe and flexible assembly under manual teleoperation. A wearable positioning system for teleoperation assembly tasks was designed to provide great flexibility and operability. The 6D coordinate information of the hand was reconstructed with a wireless locator in real-time, and three control methods were conducted. In contrast to the traditional impedance methods, an integrated position/force control method which takes the operator’s posture as the desired position was proposed, thus achieving the combination of the initiative of the operator and the compliance of the impedance control. Additionally, the method possesses the capacity of eliminating collision force caused by hand jitters and misoperation. Finally, the system was evaluated in a representative application of teleoperated peg-in-hole insertion. Additionally, a challenging task was tested to illustrate advantages of the proposed method. The results show that the position trailing is precise enough for a teleoperation system, and the proposed integrated position/force control method approaches outperformed position control and impedance in terms of precision and operability.