Bimanual Telemanipulation with Force and Haptic Feedback through an Anthropomorphic Avatar System

TL;DR

This paper introduces a bimanual telemanipulation system with force and haptic feedback using an anthropomorphic avatar, enhancing remote operation with immersive feedback and low-latency control, validated through competitions and user studies.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel anthropomorphic avatar system with predictive limit avoidance and integrated force/haptic feedback for improved teleoperation performance.

Findings

Successful system performance during ANA Avatar XPRIZE semifinals.

Effective low-latency control with predictive avatar modeling.

Positive user feedback in initial studies.

Abstract

Robotic teleoperation is a key technology for a wide variety of applications. It allows sending robots instead of humans in remote, possibly dangerous locations while still using the human brain with its enormous knowledge and creativity, especially for solving unexpected problems. A main challenge in teleoperation consists of providing enough feedback to the human operator for situation awareness and thus create full immersion, as well as offering the operator suitable control interfaces to achieve efficient and robust task fulfillment. We present a bimanual telemanipulation system consisting of an anthropomorphic avatar robot and an operator station providing force and haptic feedback to the human operator. The avatar arms are controlled in Cartesian space with a direct mapping of the operator movements. The measured forces and torques on the avatar side are haptically displayed to the operator. We developed a predictive avatar model for limit avoidance which runs on the operator side, ensuring low latency. The system was successfully evaluated during the ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition semifinals. In addition, we performed in lab experiments and carried out a small user study with mostly untrained operators.