A Framework of Robot Manipulability Learning and Control and Its Application in Telerobotics

Manipulability ellipsoid on the Riemannian manifold serves as an effective criterion to analyze, measure, and control the dexterous performance of robots. For asymmetric bilateral telerobotics, due to the different structures of leader and follower robots, it is difficult or even impossible for the operator to manually regulate the manipulability of the remote follower robot. Thus, it is desired that the follower robot can automatically regulate its manipulability to assist the operator in remote different task executions, like humans regulating their own postures to enhance manipulability and adapt to different task scenarios. This article proposes a novel framework for manipulability transfer from human to robot. In this framework, we develop a Type-2 fuzzy model-based imitation learning method to encode and reproduce manipulability ellipsoids from demonstrations. This method can achieve high performance in accuracy and computational efficiency. In addition, it supports learning from a single demonstration. Then, we combine this method with a Riemannian manifold-based quadratic programming control algorithm such that the robot manipulability can fast track the desired manipulability profile. This framework is applied to telerobotics, in which a bilateral teleoperation controller is designed that enables the robot to follow the operator's command and simultaneously self-regulate its manipulability to perform the task adaptively. Meanwhile, the operator can receive force feedback relating to the manipulability regulation. Evaluations using comparative studies and practical experiments with a 3-degrees of freedom (DoF) haptic device and 7-DoF robots are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.