Design and Development of a Novel Haptic Device with Gravity Compensation for Teleoperation

In the local portion of teleoperation system, haptic devices determine the reliability of the motion capture and the authenticity of virtual force feedback, which undertake the cooperation between the operator and remote environment. In order to perform large workspace of the local teleoperation robot, a novel haptic device with 6DOF force feedback is proposed in this paper. In addition, a synthetical gravity compensation system is applied for counterbalancing the gravity torques. Static balancing at arbitrary position is achieved observably which reinforces transparency in the teleoperation. Subsequently, idiographic performance including maximum exertable force and translational resolution are analyzed based on Jacobian matrix. For teleoperation application, the workspace of the master-slave based on kinematics is mapped and verified in the virtual environment. The demonstration is stably visualized to the operator and the result indicates that developed haptic device works and presents good performance.