Haptic-guided grasping to minimise torque effort during robotic telemanipulation

Teleoperating robotic manipulators can be complicated and cognitively demanding for the human operator. Despite these difficulties, teleoperated robotic systems are still popular in several industrial applications, e.g., remote handling of hazardous material. In this context, we present a novel haptic shared control method for minimising the manipulator torque effort during remote manipulative actions in which an operator is assisted in selecting a suitable grasping pose for then displacing an object along a desired trajectory. Minimising torque is important because it reduces the system operating cost and extends the range of objects that can be manipulated. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach in a series of representative real-world pick-and-place experiments as well as in a human subjects study. The reported results prove the effectiveness of our shared control vs. a standard teleoperation approach. We also find that haptic-only guidance performs better than visual-only guidance, although combining them together leads to the best overall results.