An intuitive multimodal haptic interface for teleoperation of aerial robots

This paper presents a novel intuitive multi-modal force feedback interface for teleoperation of mobile robotic vehicles. Two different force feedback interfaces are considered: a force feedback joystick and a novel force feedback trackball. The joystick considered is based on the admittance user interface developed by the authors in earlier work and is configured to servo velocity of the vehicle. The force feedback trackball is configured to map vehicle velocity directly to trackball velocity, exploiting the effectively infinite workspace of the trackball to overcome the classical challenge of servo controlling a slave with infinite workspace using a master device with finite workspace. A key contribution of the paper is to provide a modeling framework, based on the bond graph formalism, that allows the energy consistent modeling of input from an admittance joystick as reference to an internal velocity regulation loop for the vehicle. Once this is implemented it is straightforward to interconnect multiple input devices, and in particular the trackball device, using standard interconnection rules in bond graphs. Experiments were performed, and the outcomes verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed interface.