Toward a general bilateral teleoperation framework between dissimilar kinematic structures

In bilateral telemanipulation scenarios the human hand/arm is usually put in correspondence with a robotic hand/arm system. The kinematic structure of the human hand and of the robotic hand are typically different requiring algorithm to map human motion on the robot workspace. At the same time, the force measured at the robotic side cannot usually be displayed in the same point on the human hand/arm system. In this work we propose a bilateral mapping algorithm able to mitigate differences in master-slave kinematic structures. The algorithm is based on the use of a virtual object which allows to work on the task space abstracting from the joints space. The proposed approach has been tested with an experimental setup consisting of two single-point haptic interfaces as master devices and a robotic hand system as slave.