Citation: Peng, S.; Yu, M.; Cheng, X.;
Wang, P. Bilateral Teleoperation System
with Integrated Position/Force
Impedance Control for Assembly Tasks.
Appl. Sci. 2023, 13, 2568. https://
doi.org/10.3390/app13042568
Academic Editor: Yutaka Ishibashi
Received: 31 December 2022
Revised: 1 February 2023
Accepted: 15 February 2023
Published: 16 February 2023
Copyright: © 2023 by the authors.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
Article
Bilateral Teleoperation System with Integrated Position/Force
Impedance Control for Assembly Tasks
Shigang Peng
1,2
, Meng Yu
2,3
, Xiang Cheng
2,
* and Pengfei Wang
2,4,
*
1
Qian Xuesen Laboratory of Space Technology, China Academy of Space Technology, Beijing 100094, China
2
China Academy of Aerospace Science and Technology Innovation, Beijing 100176, China
3
School of Aerospace Engineering, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China
4
School of Mechanical Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, Xi’an 713599, China
* Correspondence: cxzqjxcx@163.com (X.C.); hvhe@163.com (P.W.)
Abstract:
This article investigates the realization of achieving safe and flexible assembly under manual
teleoperation. A wearable positioning system for teleoperation assembly tasks was designed to
provide great flexibility and operability. The 6D coordinate information of the hand was reconstructed
with a wireless locator in real-time, and three control methods were conducted. In contrast to
the traditional impedance methods, an integrated position/force control method which takes the
operator’s posture as the desired position was proposed, thus achieving the combination of the
initiative of the operator and the compliance of the impedance control. Additionally, the method
possesses the capacity of eliminating collision force caused by hand jitters and misoperation. Finally,
the system was evaluated in a representative application of teleoperated peg-in-hole insertion.
Additionally, a challenging task was tested to illustrate advantages of the proposed method. The
results show that the position trailing is precise enough for a teleoperation system, and the proposed
integrated position/force control method approaches outperformed position control and impedance
in terms of precision and operability.
Keywords:
telerobotics and teleoperation; dexterous manipulation; compliance and admittance control
1. Introduction
Due to the limitations of fully autonomous technology, there are certain shortcomings
of automated robots in complex and unstructured environments. As an important research
area in robotics, teleoperation robotics can combine the initiative of operators with the high
precision of a robot [
1
]. Telerobotics is still superior to intelligent programming methods in
terms of making quick decisions and handling emergency cases [2,3].
However, the performance of teleoperation largely depends on the operator’s skill,
and the implementation of a remote robot to perform complicated and delicate tasks
is still challenging, especially when a human operator lacks training. The operator’s
position errors may cause serious rigid collisions, and even slight negligence can result in
unnecessary loss. Position errors may be caused by hand jitters, motion positioning errors,
visual aberrations, or data processing delays in sending and receiving from relay stations.
Unfortunately, due to the physiological limitations of the operator and the performance
limitations of the equipment, position errors will always exist. This increases collision risk
in teleoperation tasks, especially in precise assembly scenarios.
To alleviate the rigid collisions caused by position errors and increase the safety of
teleoperation, researchers have proposed various high-performance control methods. To
mitigate the operating errors caused by human tremors and improve the accuracy of
teleoperation, Yang et al. [
4
] designed a filter based on a support vector machine (SVM)
for attenuating human tremors. To alleviate the rigid collisions, a novel virtual fixture
generation method on a point-set implicit surface was proposed in [
5
–
7
], and guidance
virtual fixtures were generated with a robot-centric potential force field model, as further
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