Intuitive Teleoperation of a Robotic Arm and Gripper with Soft Pneumatic Haptic Feedback

Rameshwar, Raagini

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Intuitive Teleoperation of a Robotic Arm and Gripper with Soft Pneumatic Haptic Feedback

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Robot teleoperation is a transformative field of study that can enable workers to safely perform tasks in dangerous environments. Robot arm teleoperation is particularly suited to help remotely perform delicate or intricate manipulation tasks in fields like medicine, space and ocean exploration, and hazardous waste management. The quality and usability of a teleoperation system, particularly a robot arm teleoperation system, depends on how much the user is immersed in the system and feels that the robot manipulator is an extension of their own body. We explore this sense of immersion, or “telepresence”, through the mapping scheme between the human user and robot manipulator, and through the use of realistic haptic feedback. In this thesis, I discuss our work towards a teleoperation system with safe, realistic haptic feedback for intuitive control of a robotic arm and gripper. The system involves a motion capture system that the user wears to control a robotic arm and sensorized gripper, and soft pneumatic haptic devices. We present several iterations of our system, and discuss the development of a novel user-to-robot mapping scheme as well as the development of soft “haptic muscles”, a term we coin for our pneumatic haptic feedback devices. We also present several stages of user testing, and discuss how we used each set of results to design the next iteration of our system. Our most recent system iteration is a teleoperation system that allows novice users to pick and place objects comfortably, with a task completion time of 18 seconds across all users. It also allows users to pick and place delicate objects without damaging or deforming them, and we find that the soft haptics decrease the user’s applied force by 53%.

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