Haptic guidance in bilateral teleoperation: Effects of guidance inaccuracy

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of inaccuracies of haptic guidance systems during execution of constrained tasks. The Lawrence teleoperation framework is extended in this paper by addition of an impedance type, position based attractive haptic guidance and analyzed from a control system perspective. Specifically, we focus on systems where haptic guidance is used together with position or force based feedback from a slave robot to a master device. The forces due to the inaccuracy of the guidance partially counteract the feedback force, effectively masking this problematic inaccuracy from the operator. This effect is discussed by using the proposed framework and quantified. Theoretical results are supported with numerical simulation and experimentally verified on a real 6-DOF haptic teleoperation setup.