Intercontinental, Multimodal, Wide-area Tele-Cooperation using a Humanoid Robot

This paper is the continuation of our previous work in intercontinental, collaborative teleoperation with a humanoid robot. Our new achievement consists in an extension of the former single-arm bilateral teleoperation setting to include bimanual manipulation and walking. A coupling scheme for simultaneous manipulation and locomotion is developed. Furthermore, a task-based control framework, including a force-based control for the arms as well as a walking pattern generation, is presented to realize stable whole-body motions of the highly redundant humanoid robot. Experiments have been performed to assess the proposed control scheme. They bring to light additional scientific challenges that remain in order to reach a smooth and natural telepresent collaboration.