A Compliant Teleoperation System by Utilizing Haptic Guidance and Series Elastic Actuator-Based Gripper

This article introduces a haptic-guided teleoperation framework using a series elastic actuator (SEA)-based compliant gripper. The proposed teleoperation system involves one local haptic device, one layer of virtual reality, and one remote industrial manipulator with a compliant gripper. The overall compliance of the teleoperation is distributed between the software and hardware components of the bilateral loop. On the one hand, the implemented haptic guidance is based on an elementary coupling model uniquely defined and established for all interactions among the user, remote manipulator, and virtual interface. On the other hand, the manipulator operating in the remote environment is equipped with a novel compliant gripper based on series elastic actuators, providing passive compliance at the interactions with the environment. Introducing the gripper into the haptic loop is expected to compensate for disturbances due to inaccurate modeling and/or unmodeled dynamics of the remote environment and external effects. The teleoperation system is implemented for manipulation and tracking tasks and tested with different users. Experimental results show that the haptic guidance and the compliant gripper together significantly improve the teleoperation performances in terms of transparency.