Telekit: a bilateral, teleoperated platform for hands-on learning

Bilateral teleoperation enables intuitive interaction with remote environments and is widely used in surgery, space, and industry. However, educational tools often rely on costly hardware or purely virtual setups, limiting accessibility and reducing opportunities for hands-on learning. This paper presents the Telekit, a low-cost bilateral teleoperation system designed to support practical education.

The Telekit is built on Stanford's open-source Hapkit and features a gear-based transmission for improved robustness, along with a force-sensitive resistor at the handle for rendering real-world interactions. Communication and control are implemented using MATLAB, achieving a measured single-byte round-trip delay of 2 ms. Two control strategies, Position-Position (PP) and Position-Force (PF), were developed and tested in both virtual and physical environments. PP control incorporates damping and friction compensation, while PF control utilizes force feedback from the integrated sensor.

For PP control at low frequency (0.24 Hz), damping combined with friction compensation resulted in a mean communication delay of 230 ms and a mean tracking error of 3.4 $°$ between leader and follower units. At higher frequency (1.15 Hz), damping alone reduced the mean communication delay to 140 ms but increased the mean tracking error to 8.7 $°$ . PF control enabled users to perceive different stiffness levels, with soft, medium, and hard stiffness measured at 0.17 N/ $°$ , 0.41 N/ $°$ , and 0.68 N/ $°$ , respectively.

The Telekit demonstrates that a low-cost platform can effectively support both position tracking and stiffness perception. Although performance varies with operating frequency, the system provides meaningful haptic feedback and reliable functionality. As such, it offers an accessible, hands-on solution that bridges theoretical concepts and practical experimentation in teleoperation education.