Bilateral Teleoperation with Compliant 6-DOF Pose-and-Force Sensing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a cost-effective bilateral teleoperation system using compliant 6-DOF pose-and-force sensing, decoupling multiple time scales for stable operation over delays and packet loss.

Contribution

It presents a hardware-agnostic framework with low-cost sensors and explicit time-scale decoupling, enabling stable, heterogeneous teleoperation with improved robustness.

Findings

Stable tracking under delays up to 120 ms with 40 ms variation.

Accurately matches prescribed virtual stiffness in contact.

Demonstrates passivity and favorable energy signatures.

Abstract

Existing bilateral teleoperation platforms still rely on costly rigid six-axis force/torque sensors, tightly coupled leader-follower hardware, and kilohertz control loops. We present a Cartesian bilateral framework built on the hardware-agnostic WinGs Operating Studio (WOS) middleware, in which a low-cost compliant 6-DOF pose-and-force sensing end-effector, Delta6, is mounted on both sides so that each manipulator behaves as an end-effector 6-DOF series elastic actuator (SEA). The leader runs a damping-only admittance loop with a 6-D biquad notch filter; the follower realizes a stiffness-damping impedance through a position-based outer loop with a PID wrench-to-pose mapping. Three time scales (hardware I/O, mid-rate impedance/admittance, low-rate teleoperation messages) are explicitly decoupled, enabling the same application to drive heterogeneous arms. On a Lite6/FR3 testbed at 150 Hz, the system tracks stably under delays up to $120\pm40$ ms and 1% packet loss, matches the prescribed virtual stiffness in contact, and shows a favorable cumulative energy signature in passivity-style tests.