Fundamental investigation into shared control methodologies in robotic applications

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The objective of this proposal is to investigate the fundamental issues involved in the design and implementation of shared controllers and their possible application areas of virtual training environments for surgical and biological sciences, and remote control of robotic systems and design of force feedback (haptic) devices. A virtual training environment consists of a design based on the principles of mechanics, graphics rendering and haptic user interface. One of the training approaches is to provide virtual force guidance (virtual mentoring) to the user. The objective here is to explore methods in constrained computational mechanics for effective modeling and stability analysis of such virtual guidance (e.g. to tie a knot) or constrained motions for the user. A novel shared monitoring/control scheme for the tele-manipulation over the internet will be developed for tele-surgery. Here, the expected position and force can be defined as moving constrained surfaces which can then be estimated using for example a sequential Monte Carlo scheme. Such scheme has been successfully applied to visual tracking of objects when the object can get occluded during its trajectory. In this proposal, the expected feed-forward motion to the slave device and the return feedback force to the master haptic device can be configured in a moving shared control surfaces where despite short black-outs and/or varying time delays, still a robust performance can be accomplished. A conventional approach for designing a haptic device is to interface an open or closed kinematic chain with a high bandwidth actuation mechanism in a form of an impedance device. A novel design concept is to combine an actuating source with an intermediate compliant mechanism which can create a class of low bandwidth haptic feedback along a single degree of freedom. In comparison to utilizing high torque actuators only, such active mechanism can offer an alternative and economical approach for designing a haptic device for various applications (e.g. micro-surgery). Possible approaches for combining the shape and size of the compliant membranes within the electromechanical configuration for creating haptic feedback along many degrees of freedom are the main design challenges.