In teleoperation, it is crucial for an operator to feel the reality of the work in progress. The force information is vital as much as the vision information in this respect, especially in dealing with fragile or explosive objects. Conventionally, the force information has been acquired from force sensors. However, force sensors are known to be inadequate in some cases as they require complex hardware. Furthermore, when the slave manipulator is located at a very far place from the operator as in space applications, the teleoperation system becomes unstable due to the time delay in transferring the force information from force sensors to the operator.
In this paper, we propose a novel approach that acquires the force information from the virtual realities of internal models. The slave manipulator as well as the objects are modeled beforehand. When the slave manipulator is in contact with an object, the force is calculated from the stored mode. In this approach, the problems caused by complex hardware and severe time delays become insignificant. The proposed method was implemented on a 2 DOF arm that fits to a finger of the operator. We used a robot hand as the slave manipulator and performed experiments to get force feedback from the virtual realities. The results showed the usefulness of our method.
