Experimental and simulation study on mechanical man-machine interaction of a telemanipulation system

Modeling-simulation, and experimental verification of a mechanical man-machine interaction in a force reflecting telemanipulation (FRT) system were carried out. The main objective is to establish a performance evaluation methodology for a FRT system including the dynamics of a human operator by both experimentation and simulation. To conduct a performance comparison between two FRT systems, a standard master-slave system (MA11) is chosen as a reference. A telemanipulation simulation program is therefore developed to verify the `transparency´ character of the MA11 system and the consistency of approach for operator energy (or power) expenditure when performing a peg-in-hole task in comparison with experiments. With similarity to network concepts, this program uses multibody system modeling techniques in the Bond-Graph language and some elements of the mechanical assembly theory. From this study, the human operator energy expenditure is proposed as a performance index for a FRT system