Adaptive force reflecting teleoperation with local intelligence

Purpose – This paper aims to make an industrial robot intelligently and remotely cooperate with humans to work in unknown unstructured environments. Design/methodology/approach – Presents a bilateral adaptive teleoperation control approach involving a contact force driven compensation with an auto‐switching function, which utilizes a biologically motivated compliance function. Based on sensed contact force, the switching function can adjust its slave control input to decide how much robotic intelligences should intervene in the system by switching modes. Other schemes for robotic intelligence, robotic impedances and compensators, are investigated to guarantee good transparency without warranting human error and maintain a stable contact, based on the force feedback, in constrained motion while a communication delay exists. Findings – The simulation and experimental results demonstrate transparency and contact stability in the presence of constant and time‐varying communication delays, respectively. The proposed bilateral adaptive teleoperation control method outperforms three other techniques. Originality/value – This paper introduces an adaptive teleoperation control method with local robotic intelligence assistance. The developed method does not modify the existing designs of industrial robots. The contact force and position and force errors are well controlled to obtain a stable contact and transparency, through adaptation of robotic impedances.