Development of a telerobotic system for exploration of hazardous environments

This work addresses the manipulation and control problems of a teleoperated redundant manipulator. The choice of a benchmark of extremely high requirements is technical aid in catastrophic situations like road accidents, fires and natural disasters. Such scenarios demand intuitive though powerful operation minimizing user fatigue and tension. For this reason, replicating the human motion abilities by the telemanipulator is the main challenge in the presented design. A recently developed 6 degrees of freedom (DoF) haptic input device is used as master arm and an anthropomorphic, human sized 7 DoF manipulator as the slave arm. One of the problems studied here is the connection of two kinematically dissimilar devices working in master-slave configuration with 6 degrees of freedom kinesthetic feedback, issues regarding kinematic control, compliant motion, transparency, and intuitiveness of teleoperation are discussed.