Bilateral master slave control for configuration differing manipulators

A bilateral master-slave control method for configuration differing manipulators is proposed to efficiently control remote robots working in hazardous and critical fields such as nuclear power plants, space and underwater. In this method any types of master device and slave manipulator are able to be connected with each other. Therefore it has some advantages over the conventional method in which the same types of master device and slave manipulator are employed. The first advantage of this method is to improve maneuverability in operation, the second to increase versatility and the third to be applied to a teaching operation of complex tasks in industries. The basic experiments using three types of manipulators have been done to check the feasibility of the proposed method. In these experiments the force trackerbility, the position trackerbility of the slave and the computing time of the digital computer required for the operations of coordinates transformations, position and force servos, are examined. The results of these experiments and more practical experiments such as a crank turning motion, show the reasonable feasibility and the broad applicability of the proposed method. Next, the method is extended to manipulators with different degree of freedom. The dynamics is also considered to improve the stability and teleoperation quality. Finally, a first prototype universal master device is proposed and analyzed its statics to achieve an optimal configuration.