Teleoperation of Humanoid Baxter Robot Using Haptic Feedback

This paper presents a teleoperation strategy, which is featured by haptic feedback. The teleoperation system is composed of a SensAble (R) Omni haptic device, set as the master and providing haptic feedback, and an anthropomorphic robot slave, which is embodied by the 7-DOF (degrees of freedom) robotic arm of the Baxter (R) robot. The haptic feedback enables a bilateral manipulation of the teleoperation system. The joint angles and Cartesian position of the stylus of the Omni device are sampled and transferred to the slave, determining its motion. Meanwhile a force, proportional to the amplitude of position error of the slave manipulator, is sent back to the master and applied to the stylus. Hereby, the operator can sense the motion of the Baxter robot and adjust its manipulator accordingly. The kinematics of the master and slave have been analysed and a workspace mapping has been realized. Two methods, direct angle mapping and CLIK (closed-loop inverse kinematics), are used to implement the manipulation of the slave in position-position mode. Two experiments have been designed and tested to verify the validity of the methods provided by this paper. The results of the experiments illustrate that the designed teleoperation system is feasible and effective.