Effect of kinesthetic coupling in cooperative teleoperation

In Dual Master Single Slave (DMSS) cooperative teleoperation system, the control of all axes can be decomposed between operators based on Field-of-View (FoV) deficiency resulting in decoupled control. Kinesthetic coupling between master devices links the motion of both operators and removing this coupling causes the motion of each operator to become independent of the other. In this paper, we investigated and compared the effect of kinesthetic coupling with non-kinesthetic setting in cooperative teleoperation framework. It is shown that kinesthetic coupling increases the performance and reduces the collisions in performing task. The average time to complete the trial and accumulative feedback force is found to be lesser in kinesthetic setting as compared to non-kinesthetic case.