A design framework for teleoperators with kinesthetic feedback

Abstruct-A teleoperator is a pair of robot manipulators connected in such a way as to allow an operator handling one manipulator (the master) to operate on a remote environment (via the slave). Feedback from slave to master increases the realism with which the operator interacts with the environment. Two-port models have been extensively used for the analysis of circuits in which bidirectional energy flows are present at two distinct pairs of terminals. This paper applies the hybrid two-port model to teleoperators with force and velocity sensing at the master and slave. The interfaces between human operator and master, and between environment and slave, are ports through which the teleoperator is designed to exchange energy between the operator and environment. By computing or measuring input-output properties of this two-port network , the hybrid two-port model of an actual or simulated teleoperator system can be obtained. It is shown that the hybrid model (as opposed to other two-port forms) leads to an intuitive representation of ideal teleoperator performance and applies to several teleoperator architec-tures. Thus measured values of the h matrix or values computed from a simulation can be used to compare performance with the ideal. The frequency-dependent h matrix is computed from a detailed SPICE model of an actual system, and the method is applied to a proposed new architecture.