Development of a Real-Time Force-Reflecting Teleoperation System Based on Matlab Simulations

Teleoperation is a robotics application where there is a master and a slave system interacting with each other and with the environment. Master system is often a joystick or a duplicate of the slave system that is driven by the operator. Slave system is the robot that is located at a remote site and controlled by the commands sent by the master system. Depending on the information flow, teleoperation systems are usually called unilateral or bilateral. Previously, the work conducted at FIU has addressed bilateral teleoperation, which combines position (or velocity) control of the remote system with force reflection on the master. As reported earlier, a mathematical model of such a system has been developed using Matlab Simulink blocks, and successful simulations have been carried out. This paper now focuses on real-time implementation of the master system and eventual verification of simulation results. In order to achieve this, development of the real-time system interface between the Matlab simulation environment and the master joystick as well as the interface software are described. The initial test results on this system are also presented and discussed.