3D augmented reality teleoperated robot system based on dual vision

A 3D augmented reality navigation system using stereoscopic images is developed for teleoperated robot systems. The accurate matching between the simulated model and the video image of the actual robot can be realized, which helps the operator to accomplish the remote control task correctly and reliably. The system introduces the disparity map translation transformation method to take parallax images for stereoscopic displays, providing the operator an immersive 3D experience. Meanwhile, a fast and accurate registration method of dynamic stereo video is proposed, and effective integration of a virtual robot and the real stereo scene can be achieved. Preliminary experiments show that operation error of the system is maintained at less than 2.2 mm and the average error is 0.854 7, 0.909 3 and 0.697 2 mm at x, y, z direction respectively. Lots of experiments such as pressing the button, pulling the drawer and so on are also conducted to evaluate the performance of the system. The feasibility studies show that the depth information of structure can be rapidly and recognized in remote environment site. The augmented reality of the image overlay system could increase the operating accuracy and reduce the procedure time as a result of intuitive 3D viewing.

Teleoperated Puncture Robot System:Preliminary Design and Workspace Analysis

Radiofrequency ablation(RFA)guided by X-ray images aims to relieve herniated disc pain with mini-mal invasiveness and fast recovery.It requires an accurate and fast positioning of the puncture needle.We propose a teleoperated robotic system for percutaneous puncture to support RFA.We report the kinematics modelling and workspace analysis of the proposed system,which comprises preliminary and accurate positioning mechanisms.Preliminary positioning mechanism automatically drives the needle to the puncture area,and accurate positioning is then achieved by teleoperation under the guidance of X-ray images.We calculate the teleoperation workspace of the robot system using a spatial search algorithm and quantitatively analyze the optimal structural parameters aiming to maximize the workspace.The workspace of the proposed robot system complies with clinical requirements to support RFA.

Finite-time fault-tolerant control of teleoperating cyber physical system against faults

This paper studies a finite-time adaptive fractionalorder fault-tolerant control(FTC)scheme for the slave position tracking of the teleoperating cyber physical system(TCPS)with external disturbances and actuator faults.Based on the fractional Lyapunov stability theory and the finite-time stability theory,a fractional-order nonsingular fast terminal sliding mode(FONFTSM)control law is proposed to promote the tracking and fault tolerance performance of the considered system.Meanwhile,the adaptive fractional-order update laws are designed to cope with the unknown upper bounds of the unknown actuator faults and external disturbances.Furthermore,the finite-time stability of the closed-loop system is proved.Finally,comparison simulation results are also provided to show the validity and the advantages of the proposed techniques.

An Adaptive Hand Exoskeleton for Teleoperation System

Teleoperation can assist people to complete various complex tasks in inaccessible or high-risk environments,in which a wearable hand exoskeleton is one of the key devices.Adequate adaptability would be available to enable the master hand exoskeleton to capture the motion of human fingers and reproduce the contact force between the slave hand and its object.This paper presents a novel finger exoskeleton based on the cascading four-link closed-loop kinematic chain.Each finger has an independent closed-loop kinematic chain,and the angle sensors are used to obtain the finger motion including the flexion/extension and the adduction/abduction.The cable tension is changed by the servo motor to transmit the contact force to the fingers in real time.Based on the finger exoskeleton,an adaptive hand exoskeleton is consequently developed.In addition,the hand exoskeleton is tested in a master-slave system.The experiment results show that the adaptive hand exoskeleton can be worn without any mechanical constraints,and the slave hand can follow the motions of each human finger.The accuracy and the real-time capability of the force reproduction are validated.The proposed adaptive hand exoskeleton can be employed as the master hand to remotely control the humanoid five-fingered dexterous slave hand,thus,enabling the teleoperation system to complete complex dexterous manipulation tasks.

Position Measurement Based Slave Torque Feedback Control for Teleoperation Systems With Time-Varying Communication Delays

Bilateral teleoperation system is referred to as a promising technology to extend human actions and intelligence to manipulating objects remotely.For the tracking control of teleoperation systems,velocity measurements are necessary to provide feedback information.However,due to hardware technology and cost constraints,the velocity measurements are not always available.In addition,the time-varying communication delay makes it challenging to achieve tracking task.This paper provides a solution to the issue of real-time tracking for teleoperation systems,subjected to unavailable velocity signals and time-varying communication delays.In order to estimate the velocity information,immersion and invariance(I&I)technique is employed to develop an exponential stability velocity observer.For the proposed velocity observer,a linear relationship between position and observation state is constructed,through which the need of solving partial differential and certain integral equations can be avoided.Meanwhile,the mean value theorem is exploited to separate the observation error terms,and hence,all functions in our observer can be analytically expressed.With the estimated velocity information,a slave-torque feedback control law is presented.A novel Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional is constructed to establish asymptotic tracking conditions.In particular,the relationship between the controller design parameters and the allowable maximum delay values is provided.Finally,simulation and experimental results reveal that the proposed velocity observer and controller can guarantee that the observation errors and tracking error converge to zero.

NOVEL 6-DOF WEARABLE EXOSKELETON ARM WITH PNEUMATIC FORCE-FEEDBACK FOR BILATERAL TELEOPERATION

A particular emphasis is put on a novel wearable exoskeleton arm, ZJUESA, with 6 degrees of freedom, which is used for the robot teleoperation with the force-feedback in the unknown environment. In this external structure mechanism, the 3-revolution-prismatic-spherical （3RPS） parallel mechanism is devised from the concept of the human upper-limb anatomy and applied for the shoulder 3-DOF joint. Meanwhile, the orthogonal experiment design method is introduced for its optimal design. Aiming at enhancing the performance of teleoperation, the force feedback is employed by the pneumatic system on ZJUESA to produce the vivid feeling in addition to the soft control interface. Due to the compressibility and nonlinearity of the pneumatic force feedback system, a novel hybrid fuzzy controller for the precise force control is proposed and realized based on the Mega8 microcontroller units as the units of the distributed control system on ZJUESA. With the results of several experiments for master-slave control with force feedback, the feasibility of ZJUESA system and the effect of its hybrid fuzzy controller are verified.

Composite Nonlinear Bilateral Control for Teleoperation Systems With External Disturbances

This paper presents a new composite nonlinear bilateral control method based on the nonlinear disturbance observer(NDOB) for teleoperation systems with external disturbances. By introducing the estimations of NDOB and systems' nominal nonlinear dynamics into controller design, a NDOB based composite nonlinear bilateral controller is constructed to attenuate the influence of disturbance and uncertain nonlinearities. As compared with the existing bilateral control methods which usually achieve force haptic(i.e., contact force tracking)through a passive way, the newly proposed method has two major merits: 1) asymptotical convergence of both position and force tracking errors is guaranteed;2) disturbance influence on force tracking error dynamics is rejected through the direct feedforward compensation of disturbance estimation. Simulations on a nonlinear teleoperation system are carried out and the results validate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.

A Target Grabbing Strategy for Telerobot Based on Improved Stiffness Display Device

Most target grabbing problems have been dealt with by computer vision system, however, computer vision method is not always enough when it comes to the precision contact grabbing problems during the teleoperation process, and need to be combined with the stiffness display to provide more effective information to the operator on the remote side. Therefore, in this paper a more portable stiffness display device with a small volume and extended function is developed based on our previous work. A new static load calibration of the improved stiffness display device is performed to detect its accuracy, and the relationship between the stiffness and the position is given. An effective target grabbing strategy is presented to help operator on the remote side to judge and control and the target is classified by multi-class SVM(supporter vector machine). The teleoperation system is established to test and verify the feasibility. A special experiment is designed and the results demonstrate that the improved stiffness display device could greatly help operator on the remote side control the telerobot to grab target and the target grabbing strategy is effective.

A Composite State Convergence Scheme for Bilateral Teleoperation Systems

State convergence is a novel control algorithm for bilateral teleoperation of robotic systems. First, it models the teleoperation system on state space and considers all the possible interactions between the master and slave systems. Second, it presents an elegant design procedure which requires a set of equations to be solved in order to compute the control gains of the bilateral loop. These design conditions are obtained by turning the master-slave error into an autonomous system and imposing the desired dynamic behavior of the teleoperation system. Resultantly, the convergence of master and slave states is achieved in a well-defined manner. The present study aims at achieving a similar convergence behavior offered by state convergence controller while reducing the number of variables sent across the communication channel. The proposal suggests transmitting composite master and slave variables instead of full master and slave states while keeping the operator's force channel intact. We show that,with these composite and force variables;it is indeed possible to achieve the convergence of states in a desired way by strictly following the method of state convergence. The proposal leads to a reduced complexity state convergence algorithm which is termed as composite state convergence controller. In order to validate the proposed scheme in the absence and presence of communication time delays, MATLAB simulations and semi-real time experiments are performed on a single degree-of-freedom teleoperation system.

A Telepresence-Guaranteed Control Scheme for Teleoperation Applications of Transferring Weight-Unknown Objects

Currently,most teleoperation work is focusing on scenarios where slave robots interact with unknown environments.However,in some fields such as medical robots or rescue robots,the other typical teleoperation application is precise object transportation.Generally,the object’s weight is unknown yet essential for both accurate control of the slave robot and intuitive perception of the human operator.However,due to high cost and limited installation space,it is unreliable to employ a force sensor to directly measure the weight.Therefore,in this paper,a control scheme free of force sensor is proposed for teleoperation robots to transfer a weight-unknown object accurately.In this scheme,the workspace mapping between master and slave robot is firstly established,based on which,the operator can generate command trajectory on-line by operating the master robot.Then,a slave controller is designed to follow the master command closely and estimate the object’s weight rapidly,accurately and robust to unmodeled uncertainties.Finally,for the sake of telepresence,a master controller is designed to generate force feedback to reproduce the estimated weight of the object.In the end,comparative experiments show that the proposed scheme can achieve better control accuracy and telepresence,with accurate force feedback generated in only 500 ms.

Teleoperation strategies research for collaborative welding systems based on virtual reality

Teleoperation control strategies for collaborative welding system which is targeting at giving full play to human’s superiority is designed and the fitness for teleoperation welding task of which are studied. During the teleoperation welding process, 6-DOF controller’s signal can be converted into welding torch’s position, velocity or acceleration changing which is being controlled. For welding purposes, control strategies of four modes are designed, which are static position and posture mode, dynamic position and posture mode, velocity mode and acceleration mode. A test and analysis system for testing the tracking accuracy and reliability of control strategy based on virtual reality is developed. The tracking accuracies of the four control strategies are studied in the following tests with straight line trajectory, curve trajectory or space curve trajectory. The results show that the control strategy in dynamic position and posture mode has best stability and strong adaptability which is the most suitable for the teleoperation system.

Method for Calculating Cartesian Coordinates of Operator’s Arm Joints for Anthropomorphic Manipulator Master⁃Slave Control Using Exoskeleton

The main goal of the work is to increase the accuracy of the anthropomorphic manipulator master⁃slave teleoperation by calculating the coordinates of the operator’s arm joints.The master device is an exoskeleton worn on the operator’s arm,and the slave device is an anthropomorphic manipulator.A method based on the solution of the forward kinematics and empirical simplifications is proposed in this paper.The position of the nodal points of the exoskeleton was calculated by solving the direct kinematics problem.The coordinates of the operator’s arm joints,which were rigidly connected to the exoskeleton nodal points,were calculated geometrically.For the operator’s arm elbow joint,which was flexibly connected to the exoskeleton,an empirical relation was proposed.It simplified the calculation of the elbow joint position.The experiment showed a decrease in the mismatch between the operator’s arm angles and the manipulator joint angles from 20.7°to 2.9°.The proposed method increases the convenience of the master⁃slave control.

Opportunities and Challenges of Robotics and Automation in Offshore Oil &Gas Industry

The oil and gas industry will continue to boom in the coming few decades. Obtaining oil and gas from conventional and non-conventional resources will become more and more challenging. This intensifying need will impose very considerable demands on work force, financial and technology capabilities. Since the future supplies of oil and gas are to expand, advanced technology will become increasingly necessary to obtain access to more challenging conventional and non-conventional resources. Therefore oil and gas technologies will be very costly to operate in the coming future due to hostile, hard-to-reach environments. The offshore oil industry will become a complicated myriad of advanced equipment, structures, and work force. Our objectives are to identify potential applications and research directions of robotics and automation in the oil & gas field and explore the obstacles and challenges of robotic and automation applications to this area. This study performs the necessary survey and investigation about the work conditions of robotics and automation equipment in the oil and gas industry, especially offshore oil rigs. The oil & gas industry processes are first investigated. The personals and tasks are then explored. Furthermore, this paper reviews the current robotic automation technology. The challenges and requirements are identified for robotics and automation equipment in the oil and gas industry. The requirements of robotics and automation in the oil & gas industry are presented. Future research opportunities are discussed from a technical perspective.

Controller Design for a Teleoperation System with Time Delay

A robust controller design method is presented to guarantee the stability and zero tracking error for teleoperation system with time delay. Through choosing appropriate master and slave parameters, extended state equation about master and master-slave error is achieved, which can be analyzed by using time delay knowledge. Thus delay-independent and delay-dependent criteria are derived in terms of the Lyapunov stability theorem, control parameters are obtained by the feasible of linear matrix inequalities. Experimental results show the validity of these approaches and the performance of master and slave manipulators with delay variations is analyzed.

A Teleoperation System Based on Predictive Simulation and Its Application to Spacecraft Maintenance

A teleoperation system based on predictive simulation is proposed for the sake of compensating the large time delay in the process of teleoperation to a degree and providing a friendly operating interface. The framework and function architecture of the system is discussed firstly. Then, the operator interface and a graphics simulation system is described in detail. Furthermore, a predictive algorithm aiming at position control based teleoperation is studied in our research, and the relative framework of predictive simulation is discussed. Finally, the system is applied to spacecraft breakdown maintenance; multi-agent reinforcement learning based semi-autonomous teleoperation is discussed at the same time for safe operation.

A Novel 6‑DOF Force‑Sensed Human‑Robot Interface for an Intuitive Teleoperation

The teleoperation of a 6 degrees-of-freedom(DOF)manipulator is one of the basic methods to extend people’s capabilities in the wide variety of applications.The master interface based on the force/torque(FT)sensor could provide the full-dimension intuitive teleoperation of a 6-DOF robot since it has the ability to trigger 6-DOF command input.However,due to the force coupling,noise disturbance and unlimited input signals of the FT sensor,this force-sensed interface could not be widely used in practice.In this paper,we present an intuitive teleoperation method based on the FT sensor to overcome these challenges.In this method,the input signals from the force-sensed joystick were filtered and then processed to the force commands by force limit algorithm,with the merits of anti-interference,output limitation,and online velocity adjustment.Furthermore,based on the admittance control and position controller,the manipulator could be teleoperated by the force commands.Three experiments were conducted on our self-designed robotic system.The result of the first experiment shows that the interfered force from the force coupling could be effectively suppressed with the limitation of the input force through force limit algorithm.Then,a parameter was introduced in the other two experiments to adjust the velocity online practically with force limit algorithm.The proposed method could give a practical solution to the intuitive teleoperation based on the FT sensor.

Grinding/Cutting Technology and Equipment of Multi-scale Casting Parts

Multi-scale casting parts are important components of high-end equipment used in the aerospace,automobile manufacturing,shipbuilding,and other industries.Residual features such as parting lines and pouring risers that inevitably appear during the casting process are random in size,morphology,and distribution.The traditional manual processing method has disadvantages such as low efficiency,high labor intensity,and harsh working environment.Existing machine tool and serial robot grinding/cutting equipment do not easily achieve high-quality and high-efficiency removal of residual features due to poor dexterity and low stiffness,respectively.To address these problems,a five-degree-of-freedom(5-DoF)hybrid grinding/cutting robot with high dexterity and high stiffness is proposed.Based on it,three types of grinding/cutting equipment combined with offline programming,master-slave control,and other technologies are developed to remove the residual features of small,medium,and large casting parts.Finally,the advantages of teleoperation processing and other solutions are elaborated,and the difficulties and challenges are discussed.This paper reviews the grinding/cutting technology and equipment of casting parts and provides a reference for the research on the processing of multi-scale casting parts.

Tremor suppression in master-slave robot remote welding system

Welding seam tracking precision was decreased due to human hand tremor during the master-slave welding teleoperation. To solve this problem, a master-slave robot remote welding system was built, the system consisted of a master manipulator with six degree of freedom （ DOF ） , an industrial computer control system and a slave Motoman HP3 J robot, and human hand tremor and digital filtering were discussed. An optimal digital filter was designed to clean human tremor signal for improving the welding seam tracking precision. The experimental results show that the digital filter suppresses the operator＇ s tremor signal.

A NOVEL COMMUNICATION LAW FOR BILATERAL FORCE-REFLECTING SUBSYSTEM OF TELEOPERATORS WITH TIME DELAY

This paper presents a novel communication law for teleoperators in the presence of substantial time delay. This new communication law can guarantee the stability of teleoperators in any time delay. The performance of teleoperators which use this new communication law is improved greatly.

Obstacle recognition using a haptic device

A haptic device is proposed which gives the user feedback information on their location and orientation of the obstacle through the mobile robot that detects the obstacle in an environment where the user cannot see.Mobile robot recognizes the exact position of the obstacle through configuring the nested ultrasonic sensor and giving feedback information to the haptic device.The haptic device consisting of five vibration motors can realize the haptic through the vibration of user's finger using the position information of the obstacle received feedback.In addition,it has high accuracy to recognize the surrounding environment and realizes the various situations with the fuzzy controller and the nested ultrasonic sensors.