Haptics in telerobotics - Current and future research and applications

For telerobotic systems the ultimate goal is transparency, meaning the human operator cannot distinguish between operating in a local or a distant environment. To achieve this, the human operator is coupled with the telerobotic system with all necessary senses: visual, auditory and haptic modality. For the haptic modality this implies research in the following fields: robotic hardware, both handcontroller and teleoperators, and control aspects with time delay. The latter include both supervisory and bilateral control. In this paper the current and future aspects of haptics in telerobotics are shown focusing on the control research. With the evolving technology in these research areas telerobotic systems can now be found in a variety of different application fields, e.g. microassembly, surgery or space.