Design of a 6-DOF haptic interface for robotic teleoperation

Teleoperation has become increasingly important in medical applications, handling hazardous materials, as well as in other robotics applications. Force feedback in such systems is essential; therefore a haptic device is needed in order to allow the user to feel the reactive forces between the slave manipulator and the environment.;Our main research focus is the design of a six degrees of freedom parallel robot to be used as a master haptic interface in internet-based teleoperation. This parallel robot is based on two five-bar linkage mechanisms leading to a low weight, compact, and efficient haptic device with a promising successful implementation for telerobotic applications such as endoscopic surgery.;An optimization algorithm has been used to optimize the device parameters to avoid singularities and minimize the effects of the inertia, friction forces and backlash. The Jacobian formulation as well as the forward and inverse kinematics have been derived for the system under consideration.;In our application, our parallel haptic device will be used as a master and a 6-DOF open architecture industrial robot will be used as a slave. The position and orientation of the end-effector of the master will be sent to the slave arm as commands to reproduce the motion of the master. The environmental forces applied to the slave robot are transmitted to the operator through the motors of the master haptic device.