Bilateral teleoperation with object-adaptive mapping

Task space mapping approaches for bilateral teleoperation, namely object-centered ones, have yielded the most promising results. In this paper, we propose an invertible mapping approach to realize teleoperation through online motion mapping by taking into account the locations of objects or tools in manipulation skills. It is applied to bilateral teleoperation, with the goal of handling different object/tool/landmark locations in the user and robot workspaces while the remote objects are moving online. The proposed approach can generate trajectories in an online manner to adapt to moving objects, where impedance controllers allow the user to exploit the haptic feedback to teleoperate the robot. Teleoperation experiments of pick-and-place tasks and valve turning tasks are carried out with two 7-axis torque-controlled Panda robots. Our approach shows higher efficiency and adaptability compared with traditional mappings.