This paper presents theoretical and experimental results of robot interaction control schemes for a teleoperation system whose slave end effector comes in contact with a compliant surface. A salient feature of this work is a comparison of different control schemes implemented on a system whose slave consists of an industrial robot with an open software architecture and equipped with a wrist force sensor. Three control strategies are considered; one based on a single regulator PID giving a nominal performance, the second based on impedance control, and the last one based on a hybrid system approach. The performance of the various schemes is compared on a contact and puncturing task of an elastic membrane. The comparison is first carried out in simulation and then the simulations are validated with experiments. Quantitative as well as subjective performance measures are compared to assess the performance of the different control schemes.

This paper presents a comparison of four control strategies for a teleoperation system with a flexible link slave. In the classic literature, slave devices are considered only with rigid links whereas applications such as space robotics include flexible links. Thus, a more realistic model of a telemanipulator to compare and evaluate the performance of control architectures for teleoperation needs to be developed. The simulation is based on a one degree of freedom telemanipulation system available in our laboratory. Results indicate that position control modes could yield better performance than rate control when considering point-to-point tests.