Teleoperation with a 12-DOF Coarse-Fine Manipulator

We are developing a system which will allow users to manipulate objects in a remote environment with high fidelity. The system uses a 6-DOF industrial robot (Puma 560) equipped with an IBM 6-DOF fine-motion magnetic levitation wrist. The resulting 12-DOF coarse-fine manipulator serves as the slave in a master-slave teleoperation system incorporating our recently developed magnetic levitation haptic interface used as master. Since both master and slave use Lorentz magnetic levitation, the system has high bandwidth and high resolution. This circumvents many of the problem of conventional teleoperation or telemanipulation systems where friction, inertia, and backlash limit performance. Our goal is to help elucidate the nature of haptic interaction by comparing user’s effectiveness in dealing with i) real environments, ii) simulated environments, and iii) remote real environments.