Control Issues in Teleoperation and

Haptic Interfaces

Professor Tim Salcudean

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

University of British Columbia

An overview of the activities in the speaker's laboratory will be presented

first. These activities include optimization-based design of haptic interfaces, design of simulation and virtual environments, and medical

robotics. A teleoperation approach to diagnostic ultrasound, in which the ultrasound transducer is positioned by a robot, will be presented in detail, and includes aspects of design of an inherently safe counterbalanced robot, as well as aspects of control system design for trajectory tracking. The robot has been successfully controlled in position, velocity and force mode. Visual servoing for motion in the plane of the ultrasound probe has also been demonstrated using a modified image correlation algorithm and feature tracking algorithms. Research issues that have arisen in developing this and other systems designed for human augmentation will also be discussed.

Teleoperation control approaches will be presented next. The main ideas behind optimization-based, passivity-based and combined motion/force approaches will be described. Experimental results and the tradeoffs between the various methods will be discussed.

Friday, March 22, 2002

3:30 - 5:00 p.m.

1500 EECS