A teleoperation system with an exoskeleton interface

In this paper, a teleoperation system with an exoskeleton interface is proposed. An upper-limb exoskeleton worn by a user acts as an interface between the user and a robot in a remote place by exchanging position and force information via the Internet. The robot performs a dexterous task by following the upper-limb motion. The applied external force to the robot is transmitted to the exoskeleton worn by the user. To deliver and apply the position and force information accurately, a rotary series elastic mechanism controlled by a proportional and derivative (PD) controller whose gain is tuned by a linear quadratic (LQ) method is applied as an actuator module. A robust control algorithm, disturbance observer, is added to improve the robustness against the modeling uncertainties. A transmission control protocol (TCP) with a packet buffer is used for telecommunications. The performance of the proposed system and control algorithms was verified by experiments with an elbow-actuated upper-limb exoskeleton and a one degrees of freedom (DOF) robotic arm.