Efficient Human-Robot Interaction requires flexible role switching and robust role distribution. Leader and follower agents are mostly recognized based on interaction forces. This often comes with the drawback of reduced robustness and the necessity of models of the robot's environment or human be-haviour. This video presents the recently proposed Elasto-Plastic Robot Compliance (EPRC) concept that, being power-based, additionally considers the robot velocity in role recognition. Thus, active environments can be detected inducing enhanced virtual plastic compliance of the robot. Such plastic compliance refers to evasive robot motions induced specifically by active environments, after which the robot is not pushed back to the initial point of contact in contrast to elastic compliance. The video further presents advantages as role distribution specific to different degrees-of-freedom, independence from model generation and unrestricted force application.

Multi-agent control of a robot using multiple controllers is vital in domains like shared control and reliable control. The strategy of assigning a varying priority (authority) to each agent controller, and commanding the robot using an authority-weighted sum of the forces produced by all the agents has been exploited in prior works. In this paper, firstly, we show that this strategy results in a loss of passivity, and we identify the passivity-disrupting scaling-related terms. Secondly, we propose a model independent method to ensure finite-gain L2stability of such a generic multi-agent robot control system with time-varying force scaling factors. Thirdly, the analysis is validated with simulations and hardware experiments.

Robotic teleoperation is a key technology for a wide variety of fields. Teleoperating a humanoid in particular is essential as it allows the user to act remotely on an interface designed especially for humans, e.g., in a space station, or operating tools and machinery in disaster scenarios. This paper presents a ‘task-relevant’ haptic interface for humanoid teleoperation, which bridges the gap between the task at hand and the balance of the robot. The operator is given command over the humanoid's hands and is informed through haptic cues about the impact of her/his potential actions on the robot’ stability. Moreover, a null-space autonomous controller acts in the operator's null-space to provide her/him with a wider workspace and help in the successful execution of the task. The architecture is designed to top an existing compliance controller for a torque-controlled humanoid robot. Experiments on the humanoid robot TORO are reported to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the approach.

Despite the substantial progression of autonomous driving systems, their application is often limited e.g. due to safety margins which can be caused by uncertainties in the environment reconstruction. Then, via teleoperation as a fallback solution, a human-in-the-loop can be introduced as the main decision maker. However, high delay in the communication channel distorts the performance of direct force feedback teleoperation for example in space or disaster scenarios. On the other hand, model-mediated teleoperation can provide instantaneous and even predictive force feedback to the user, but the performance is limited due to state mismatches, incomplete models, model errors and the modeling challenges of complex wheel-ground contacts. Therefore, in this paper we introduce the concept of extended model-mediated teleoperation with a car like interface for mobile robots by fusing local fictitious and remote force feedback, which can be measured, computed or fictitious. We provide a method to guarantee stability of the extended model-mediated teleoperation (involving time delay, multilateral coupling, fictitious force feedback and permanent updates of the local model) based on the passivity theorem. The benefits of the approach are highlighted by human-in-the-loop experiments with a wheeled mobile robot.

Multiple robotic agents, autonomous or teleoperated, can be employed to synergise and cooperate to achieve a common objective more effectively. Tasks using robotic manipulators can be eased and improved in terms of reliability, adaptability and ergonomics via robot cooperation. In spite of visual and haptic feedback, cooperative telemanipulation of multiple robots by distant operators can still be challenging due to practical limitations in synchronisation and supervision. This paper presents a new control approach for haptic intention augmentation between two human operators handling objects via teleoperation in a cooperative manner. The force feedback to each operator is enhanced by information on the motion intention of the other operator observed by a force sensor at the input devices. Besides on-ground experiments, an experiment is presented that involves the cooperative teleoperation of an on-ground robot by a cosmonaut on the International Space Station and another distant operator on ground.

Field robots used in unstructured and dynamic environments - and teleoperation have shifted into the focus of a variety of industrial branches in the past few years. The lack of space in the atomic industry, on oil platforms and in space applications demands additional adaptations to current robotic setups. In this paper a MMSS (Multi-Master-Single-Slave) haptic teleoperation system is proposed through which one operator using two master arms can manipulate objects in a cooperative way via one slave robot and a virtual gripping point. To ease the execution of a peg-in-hole task of big objects, a task allocation in the cartesian frame of the virtual gripping point is introduced additionally. The stability of this multilateral system with time delay is guaranteed by the Time Domain Passivity Approach. Therefore the system is divided into several modular subsystems which renders the system easily adaptable to other scenarios.

In the past few years x-by-wire has evolved into the trend-setting technology in the field of transport. It allows for the design of new modular vehicle concepts such as the robotic electric vehicle ROboMObil. Through its four wheel robots, which can be accelerated, decelerated and steered independently, a highly maneuverable design is achieved. A fully actuated three degree of freedom sidestick is proposed in this paper as a haptic interface to the three horizontal degrees of motion of the ROboMObil. The main focus lies on the user access to the rear wheel steering behavior or to the instantaneous center of rotation respectively. Two approaches have been designed and analyzed to improve the robustness against pilot induced oscillations.