Haptic based teleoperation with master-slave motion mapping and haptic rendering for space exploration

This paper presents a new solution to haptic based teleoperation to control a large-sized slave robot for space exploration, which includes two specially designed haptic joysticks, a hybrid master-slave motion mapping method, and a haptic feedback model rendering the operating resistance and the interactive feedback on the slave side. Two devices using the 3R and DELTA mechanisms respectively are developed to be manipulated to control the position and orientation of a large-sized slave robot by using both of a user's two hands respectively. The hybrid motion mapping method combines rate control and variable scaled position mapping to realize accurate and efficient master-slave control. Haptic feedback for these two mapping modes is designed with emphasis on ergonomics to improve the immersion of haptic based teleoperation. A stiffness estimation method is used to calculate the contact stiffness on the slave side and play the contact force rendered by using a traditional spring-damping model to a user on the master side stably. Experiments by using virtual environments to simulate the slave side are conducted to validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed solution.