Projects

Laser Assisted Real-Time and Scaled Telerobotic Manipulator Control with Haptic Feedback for Activities of Daily Living

This is a novel method of using laser data to generate trajectories and virtual constraints in real time that assist the user teleoperating a remote arm to execute tasks in a remote unstructured environment.

The laser also helps the user to make high-level decisions such as selecting target objects by pointing the laser at them. The trajectories generated by the laser enable autonomous control of the remote arm and the virtual constraints enable scaled teleoperation and virtual fixtures based teleoperation. The assistance to the user in scaled and virtual fixture based teleoperation modes is either based on position feedback or force feedback to the master. The user has the option of choosing a velocity control mode in teleoperation in which the speed of the remote arm is proportional to the displacement of the master from its initial position. At any point, the user has the option of choosing a suitable control mode after locating targets with the laser. The various control modes have been compared with each other, and time and accuracy based results have been presented for a 'pick and place' task carried out by three healthy subjects. The system is intended to assist users with disabilities to carry out their ADLs (Activities of Daily Living) but can also be used for other applications involving teleoperation of a manipulator. The system is PC based with multithreaded programming strategies for Real Time arm control and the controller is implemented on QNX.