Design and Control of Admittance-Type Telemanipulation Systems

This thesis summarizes guidelines for the design and control of a highly integrated, multi-modal, and intuitive teleoperation system that can be used to perform a variety of different manipulation tasks requiring bimanual and multi-fingered interactions as well as the collaboration of multiple operators. Hereby, exclusively teleoperation systems using admittance-type devices are investigated. Bimanual 6 DOF manipulations with high interaction forces are realized by newly developed admittance-type haptic interfaces, which are mounted on a mobile platform and thus also allow performance of manipulations in large remote environments. Taking into account a large number of mechatronic requirements, a novel, enhanced, and highly integrated teleoperation system consisting of redundant haptic interfaces and telemanipulators as well as a stereo-vision-system is developed. Dextrous fine manipulations are realized by a multi-fingered telemanipulation system, whereby efficient position and force mapping algorithms are used to map human hand motions to gripper motions and to provide a realistic force feedback. The usage of admittance-type devices instead of classical impedance-type devices poses new challenges on the control concepts. Different types of bilateral control algorithms suitable for admittance-type devices are proposed and robust stability of them is analyzed by using the parameter space approach. Further improvements are achieved by incorporating human factors in the development process. Effects of varied human movement control on task performance and feeling of telepresence are analyzed by means of experimental evaluation and new design guidelines for a user-friendly teleoperation system are derived. Finally, different types of collaborative teleoperation architectures are proposed, application scenarios are described, and challenges on the control of these systems are formulated. In particular, robust stability of a bimanual, a multi-user, and a cooperative teleoperation system is investigated in detail. A variety of laboratory experiments, characterized particularly by their very high complexity, serve for the evaluation and validation of all proposed software and hardware developments.