Reduced-complexity Teleimpedance Command Interface Enabling Single-handed Control of 3D Stiffness for Unstructured Tasks

Abstract

The state-of-the-art teleimpedance command interfaces used to command the robot stiffness configuration are either too complex to set up, such as those that use physiological signals and other tracking methods or cannot configure the stiffness appropriately for 3d environments.
To mitigate these issues, a novel teleimpedance interface is proposed.
The proposed interface can independently control the stiffness configuration's shape, orientation, and size with single-hand operations while allowing the operator to use that hand to command the robot's position.
The teleimpedance interface is attached to the operator's hand and uses two scroll wheels, a joystick, and a force sensor to configure the robot's stiffness and has two different modes of operation.
Compared to the state-of-the-art methods, the main advantage of the proposed teleimpedance command interface is that it does not require additional hardware with force feedback or complex setup calibrations while allowing for control of the robot's 3D stiffness configuration with single-handed operation.
An experiment with human subjects was performed to demonstrate the proposed interface's acceptance and functionality.
To demonstrate the teleimpedance command interface's ability to adjust 3D stiffness configurations a teleoperation was performed, utilizing a Kuka robotic arm and a Force Dimension Sigma7 position input interface.
The teleimpedance interface functioned as intended during teleoperation in a 3D environment to configure and adjust the 3D stiffness configuration for the task in real-time.
The results from the human subject trials indicate that the participants can successfully operate the interface to complete the alignment tasks in both modes for 3D stiffness configurations.