Tavakoli Mahdi, Aziminejad Arash, Patel Rajni V, Moallem Mehrdad
School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA.
IEEE Trans Syst Man Cybern B Cybern. 2007 Dec;37(6):1512-28. doi: 10.1109/tsmcb.2007.903700.
In master-slave teleoperation applications that deal with a delicate and sensitive environment, it is important to provide haptic feedback of slave/environment interactions to the user's hand as it improves task performance and teleoperation transparency (fidelity), which is the extent of telepresence of the remote environment available to the user through the master-slave system. For haptic teleoperation, in addition to a haptics-capable master interface, often one or more force sensors are also used, which warrant new bilateral control architectures while increasing the cost and the complexity of the teleoperation system. In this paper, we investigate the added benefits of using force sensors that measure hand/master and slave/environment interactions and of utilizing local feedback loops on the teleoperation transparency. We compare the two-channel and the four-channel bilateral control systems in terms of stability and transparency, and study the stability and performance robustness of the four-channel method against nonidealities that arise during bilateral control implementation, which include master-slave communication latency and changes in the environment dynamics. The next issue addressed in the paper deals with the case where the master interface is not haptics capable, but the slave is equipped with a force sensor. In the context of robotics-assisted soft-tissue surgical applications, we explore through human factors experiments whether slave/environment force measurements can be of any help with regard to improving task performance. The last problem we study is whether slave/environment force information, with and without haptic capability in the master interface, can help improve outcomes under degraded visual conditions.
在处理精细且敏感环境的主从式远程操作应用中，向用户手部提供从设备/环境交互的触觉反馈非常重要，因为这能提高任务性能和远程操作透明度（逼真度），而远程操作透明度是指用户通过主从系统可获得的远程环境的临场感程度。对于触觉远程操作，除了具备触觉功能的主接口外，通常还会使用一个或多个力传感器，这就需要新的双边控制架构，同时增加了远程操作系统的成本和复杂性。在本文中，我们研究了使用测量手部/主设备以及从设备/环境交互的力传感器以及利用局部反馈回路对远程操作透明度的额外益处。我们从稳定性和透明度方面比较了双通道和四通道双边控制系统，并研究了四通道方法针对双边控制实施过程中出现的非理想情况（包括主从通信延迟和环境动态变化）的稳定性和性能鲁棒性。本文探讨的下一个问题是主接口不具备触觉功能但从设备配备有力传感器的情况。在机器人辅助软组织手术应用的背景下，我们通过人为因素实验探索从设备/环境力测量对于提高任务性能是否有帮助。我们研究的最后一个问题是，无论主接口是否具备触觉功能，从设备/环境力信息能否在视觉条件不佳的情况下帮助改善手术效果。
