Examination of workspace mapping methods for haptic teleoperation

Master-slave teleoperation systems is being used in many research areas for decades and the advances in computer technologies allow smaller master devices to be used. However, these advances made it harder to map between master and slave robots. The kinematic and dynamic models of the system and workspace sizes are important factors to apply mapping methods. Rate, position, ballistic control and boundary drift control are the methods which are studied in literature. Rate control, position control, modified rate and position control, ballistic control and variable scaling control are used in this study because of their easy adaptation. For human experiments, users are given a mission appropriate to all mapping methods and qualitative information in regard to ergonomy and usability as well as data from distance sensors are collected and interpreted. Phantom Omni haptic device is used as master and Stäubli RX160 robot arm used as slave robot. The applications running on main computer is written and compiled by C/C++ programming language, which is a lightweight programming language and compatible for almost all operating systems. OpenHaptics Toolkit which is an open source library is used for communication of the computer with the haptic device. This way communication delays aimed to be lowered.