Evaluation of a proposed workspace spanning technique for small haptic device based manipulator teleoperation

This paper presents an evaluation of a new proposed workspace spanning technique for master/slave system teleoperation which is still a challenging task. This new technique integrates position control and a modified rate control methods to solve the problem of workspace mapping of two kinematically dissimilar robots used in teleoperation system. The slave device is having a large workspace in most cases while the master device is usually having a physically limited workspace. The workspace mapping of a small haptic device based robot should be handled carefully without disturbing the user perception of continuous teleoperating the robot movement in a natural and precise way. The proposed technique referred to as Positioning with Modified Rate Control is simple and overcomes the drawbacks of other techniques like indexing, rate control, ballistic control, and drift control. It depends on switching between rate control with constant speed for coarse motion and position control for accurate movements. Experimental setup based on phantom premium haptic device as a master and RV-2AJ Mitsubishi robot arm as a slave is used to evaluate the feasibility of the proposed technique. Experimental results demonstrate that the operator can easily navigate through the whole workspace of an industrial robot using a small haptic device while achieving accurate positioning. Besides, the proposed technique is judged against the scaling technique in performing a prescribed task to evaluate its performance.