Virtual reality based teleoperation which tolerates geometrical modeling errors

It is well known that teleoperation with time delay causes force feedback control to become unstable. Therefore, bilateral control could not be used in such applications as space teleoperation with time delay. Force feedback information is, however, very important for the operator when performing contact tasks. Recently, virtual reality has been introduced to support force feedback based teleoperation with long time delay. The operator can feel the forces which are generated in the virtual world, even if there is long time delay. Unfortunately, virtual reality based teleoperation is prone to modeling errors between the real world and the virtual world. In this paper we propose such a teleoperation system which combines velocity-level commands with certain slave arm autonomy. The experimental results show that our system is robust with respect to tolerances in the geometrical model, and also, through the feedback loop from the virtual environment the operator can always feel a stable force