Compliance estimation during bilateral teleoperation of a robotic arm

A method for estimating compliance properties of objects in the workspace of remotely located robotic manipulators is presented herein. An architecture that supports decoupled remote teleoperation is briefly described, and used to control the manipulator during recovery of an object´s compliance parameters. These parameters are based on the Kelvin-Voigt contact model and estimated in simulation as well as experimentally using offline and online estimation techniques. A comparison of the estimation techniques reveals that the proposed RANSAC-based technique is better suited to compliance recovery over existing methods, even in the presence of sensor noise. The recovered parameters are used to update a reconfigurable compliance object in simulation to closely match that of the real-world object, thereby enabling the use of realistic haptic feedback during remote teleoperation.