Preliminary Research on Haptic Guidance-based Hydraulic Manipulator Control for Improving Tele-operation Performance

Abstract

With the development of underwater infrastructure, various tele-operation tasks in the underwater environment are necessary. However, underwater teleoperations may bring about several problems such as task failure and robot damage due to a lack of perception information about the working environment and operator inexperience. In this study, we conducted basic research on haptic guidance-based hydraulic manipulator control for improving operator performance and preventing task failures. Our system creates a virtual environment and virtual wall based on the user-specified task environment and path, and implements haptic guidance to guide the manipulator end-tip position based on the error between user's input and desired guideline. The proposed haptic guidance technology was verified using a hydraulic manipulator in the underwater environment, and it was confirmed that the system could follow the working path well by correcting the master device input errors through force feedback.