Bilateral tele-haptic interface for controlling a robotic manipulator

Haptic feedback in teleoperation allows the operator to feel a remote environment. In this paper, we propose a bilateral controller for a robotic manipulator using a haptic device. This allows the human operator to intuitively jog the manipulator from a remote station. The proposed system architecture consists of a5 DOF robotic manipulator (Dagu Robot Arm) as a slave robot manipulator which can be controlled by moving the master haptic device (Phantom Omni) that can give haptic feedback to the user. Such a human-in-the-loop approach to control a remote robotic system offers a pragmatic solution when the robotic system is operating under dynamically changing environments and dexterous tasks. The inclusion of haptic feedback offers the potential to augment the operators' control task and overcome the limitations of visual perception within the robots operating environment. This paper also covers the force sensor experiments that help in classifying object properties that are needed to render haptic feedback as the slave robot touches both deformable and rigid surfaces.