Impedance Field-Based Teleoperation With Data Holders for Reducing Data Traffic in Haptic Transmission and Its Analysis of Performance and Stability

In order to realize a vivid tactile transmission in a teleoperation system, it is necessary to send and receive a lot of motion information such as position, speed, and force with extreme high frequency. In addition, in the actual use, many systems are connected to each other through a network. Against this backdrop, the explosive increase in communication traffic becomes a serious problem. The difficulty of this problem is that there exist complicated exchanges of motion information among the systems and they affect each other. Therefore, this article proposes a novel configuration of a teleoperation system that consists of the conversion technique of transmitted and received information into a single physical quantity (equilibrium force) and the reconstruction technique of discrete data (ZOH: zero-order hold/FOH: first-order hold). The analyses and experiments revealed that 1) FOH is superior to ZOH in terms of operational force 2) FOH and ZOH are about the same performance in terms of reproducibility 3) FOH tends to be more unstable when the packet transmission period increases.