D3.2 - Force-guided teleoperation

When grasping and manipulating dangerous and potentially fragile materials, it is vital for a robot’s contact forces to be regulated with high precision: too much force and the material might rupture. The team at Lincoln set out to use the dexterity of the human hand to control the contact forces of remote robotic hands. For this project, bilateral teleoperation was achieved using Franka Emika Panda Arms. (2 arms!)

The torque-controlled robotic arms were programmed to generate feedback forces such that the machine would mimic a haptic device and enhance the user experience of the human operator while performing a teleoperation task.

A method was developed to incorporate robot trajectories learned from human demonstrations and dynamically adjust the level of robotic assistance based on how closely the detected intentions matched these trajectories.

Another method was developed to enable real-time control with less communication latency. This was tested and verified for long-distance teleoperation tasks.