Involving the operator in a singularity avoidance strategy for a redundant slave manipulator in a teleoperated application

This paper proposes a control scheme to apply in a redundant slave robot in a teleoperated application. Singularities are avoided through a damped least-squares formulation of the inverse kinematics problem. A direct approach for selecting the damping factor is proposed. The redundant degree of freedom (DOF) is used to keep the manipulator in the most manipulable position and within the joint limits. In addition, all the redundancy resolution is performed whilst feeding back information to the operator who can help to improve the performance and robustness of the whole system.