A Review of Bilateral Teleoperation Control Strategies with Soft Environment

Abstract

In the past two decades, bilateral teleoperation with haptic feedback has attracted great research and application interests in both robotics and other areas. Initially triggered by the need to handle dangerous and remote distance tasks such as nuclear materials manipulation and space exploration, bilateral teleoperation has found its way into other applications as a result of development of control theory, robotic technology (both hardware and software) and latest breakthrough in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Consequently, bilateral teleoperation is found facing new challenges brought by these new applications. One major and obvious change is the working environment for the slave manipulator: different from rigid or solid contact environments which are reasonably assumed in early applications in industrial, nuclear and aerospace applications, the slave environment is now more complex and often the objects in contact are much softer in term of stiffness and can not be described by simple elastic model if good teleoperation performance (accurate and transparent) is expected. In this paper, the research of bilateral teleoperation system considering soft environment in recent 20 years has been surveyed for the first time in literature, to the knowledge of the authors. Following the difference in real applications, in this review the definition of soft environment covers linear elastic environment with much lower stiffness than conventional industrial environment and nonlinear complex soft environment with/out time-varying characteristics. Accordingly, the surveyed control strategies and structures in recent literature to improve the stability and accuracy of bilateral teleoperation with soft environment are classified and explained. Finally, the main applications, current challenges and future perspectives of bilateral teleoperation with soft environment are discussed.

Soft Tissue Feature Tracking Based on Deep Matching Network

“…In recent years, surgical robots have begun to be frequently used in minimally invasive surgery to reduce the pain of patients, reduce the work intensity of the surgeon, improve the accuracy of surgical operations, and reduce the difficulty of surgical operations [1][2][3][4]. This operation is mainly used for disease monitoring and treatment of various parts of the human body through an endoscope, which enters the human body through a small channel (a natural channel or a channel confirmed by a doctor).…”

2D/3D Multimode Medical Image Alignment Based on Spatial Histograms

“…Their imaging principles are similar, but many types of medical images are used in clinical practice. Moreover, there is a significant difference between some types of images in terms of imaging principles [38]. Therefore, the 2D/3D registration method based on DRR is not always applicable.…”

Integrating Virtual, Mixed, and Augmented Reality into Remote Robotic Applications: A Brief Review of Extended Reality-Enhanced Robotic Systems for Intuitive Telemanipulation and Telemanufacturing Tasks in Hazardous Conditions

“…Teleoperation systems cope with dynamic environments by integrating advanced technologies such as sensor fusion, artificial intelligence, machine learning, adaptive algorithms, and human supervision [65,66]. These systems use various sensors to gather real-time data and employ AI algorithms to process and adapt to dynamic changes.…”