Dual-User Teleoperation Systems: New Multilateral Shared Control Architecture and Kinesthetic Performance Measures

This paper proposes a novel six-channel multilateral shared control architecture for dual-user teleoperation systems. The proposed controller allows interaction between two users as well as the slave and environment through a dominance factor. The dominance factor adjusts the authority of the users over the slave robot and environment. The proposed controller is implemented on a haptic simulation test bed consisting of two planar twin pantograph haptic devices and a simulated pantograph as the slave robot. To analyze the kinesthetic performance of the proposed multilateral shared controller, a number of performance measures are extended or proposed. These measures are evaluated analytically and experimentally for various types of environments, users’ grasps, and levels of dominance of the users over the task.