Telerobotics: From Surgery to Satellite Servicing –

Why is it so hard to feel?

Professor Gunter Niemeyer

Stanford University

Department of Mechanical Engineering

Telerobotics has been an active field for nearly half a century, connecting human operators to remote robots. More recently, we have seen applications to surgery and haptic interfaces are connecting users to objects in virtual reality. But in all cases, it has been difficult to make these connections seem realistic and operators complain about a lack of feel.

Many problems can be traced to the underlying control systems, which were inherited from autonomous robotics and stand in contrast to the operator's requirements. For example, humans are very sensitive to high frequency vibrations as indicators of contact and interaction dynamics. Unfortunately, these signals are commonly attenuated by the system. Constructing the controllers from a human perspective leads to novel designs and significant improvements. We will discuss some of these developments and show how we can make force feedback a reality.

Friday, September 14, 2007

3:30 – 4:30 p.m.

Rm. 1500 EECS