Transmission of force sensation by environment quarrier based on multilateral control

In recent years, realization of a haptic system is desired strongly in the fields of medical treatment and expert´s skill acquisition. The bandwidth of force sensing and friction compensation are very important problems for reproduction of vivid force sensation. In this paper, an environment quarrier is proposed for bilateral teleoperation instead of force sensors. The environment quarrier is a novel force sensing method which consists of a twin robot system. Two same types of robots are required and they are controlled in the same position, velocity and acceleration by bilateral acceleration control based on a disturbance observer. One robot is in contact motion and the other is unconstrained. The purity of external force is obtained by subtracting the disturbance torque in the unconstrained robot from the constrained one. The environment quarrier can observe the external force with high bandwidth and friction compensation. In order to implement the environment quarrier to a bilateral control system, four robots are required. In this paper, the idea of multilateral control is introduced for attainment of simultaneity. Furthermore, this paper shows that the controller design of the multilateral control in the modal space. The experimental results showed the viability of the proposed method.