Kinematics and control of a fully parallel force-reflecting hand controller for manipulator teleoperation

Force feedback can enhance the efficiency of a teleoperation system by providing the operator with a sense of feel of the forces and torques arising from the interaction of the slave manipulator with the remote environment. This article addresses the kinematic analysis and control of a Parallel FOrce-Reflecting Hand Controller (PFORHC) whose design and implementation are based on a fully parallel mechanism. Kinematic analysis on the PFORHC is performed and results in a closed-form solution for the inverse kinematics. The forward kinematics is solved by Newton-Raphson's method. A fixed-gain PD control scheme is developed for force feedback control. Experiments are conducted to study the performance of the force-reflecting capability of the PFORHC. Experimental results show that the force control scheme utilizing a handgrip force sensor provides smaller steady-state errors as compared to the case utilizing no handgrip force sensor.