Design and development of Teleoperation System

The sense of touch conveys rich and detailed information about an object. When it's combined with other senses, especially sight, touch dramatically increases the amount of information. The increase in information reduces user error, as well as the time it takes to complete a task. It also reduces t

Project Title

Design and development of Teleoperation System

Project Area of Specialization

Robotics

Project Summary

The sense of touch conveys rich and detailed information about an object. When it's combined with other senses, especially sight, touch dramatically increases the amount of information. The increase in information reduces user error, as well as the time it takes to complete a task. It also reduces the energy consumption and the magnitudes of contact forces used in a teleoperation situation. This is where the field of haptics comes into play, to implement a semi-autonomous tele-manipulator, which allows simulating touch in a virtual world. Telerobotic can be used for challenging and hazardous tasks in remote environments. In a teleoperation system, the master can give an instruction, e.g., position or velocity through a communication channel to a remotely located slave while the slave can send telepresence data, e.g., position or force or manipulation assistance data, e.g., collision avoidance information, tracking error etc. back to the master. Channel used for communication i.e. internet shows variable transmission delays. The delta configured robot is interfaced using object-oriented programming in C++ and Arduino.

Project Objectives

Objective 1: Interfacing between master and slave.

The Novint Falcon, which is a PC input device. For communication between master and slave Falcons, they both should be interfaced with separate PCs and those PCs should be able to communicate with each other via the internet. Our task is to allow two-way communication between the two haptic devices and for the master device to be able to sense what the slave device is feeling and successful translation of force feedback from the slave side

Objective 2: Accuracy in bi-lateral communication

The haptic system gives force feedback to the user from the real environment. Information about force, position and velocity are bi-directionally transmitted in this control system. In the communication between the master and slave telerobotic system, time-delay is unavoidable when data is exchanged, due to a vast distance between them. The delay leads to noise interference in the transmission of this force feedback information to other pair of its subsystem and results in deterioration of the overall performances. Stability and performance would have to be considered and an optimized solution would be explored between these two.

Objective 3: Implementation exercise

Experiments would later be conducted for checking all the points covered above that is position and force tracking. This can be done by circle tracing methods to check the trackability of the slave with the commands of the master. Then we would do force feedback experiments that involve the slave giving force feedback data to the master how much telepresence the master feels after receiving the data.

Project Implementation Method

In this teleoperation setup, the haptic device will be interfaced with a PC.  The movement of the master device is translated into numeric positions which are sensed by an encoder.  Encoder data is first sent to server PC.  To pass this encoder data to slave device server PC communicates with client PC at slave side via socket.

Teleoperation system is divided into two parts:

• interfacing the device with PC
• communication network between PCs.

INTERFACING

The Force Dimension SDK can be downloaded from www.forcedimension.com/download/sdk

Open the SDK-3.7.3.3210-win-x64 file in downloads to launch the installation program

For connecting the device, on the device back plate, connect the data cable and power supply cable to their respective connectors connect the other end of the data cable to the PC and of the power supply cable to the step-down power supply (220V/110V). If the display of the device is blue, the device is ready to use.

COMMUNICATION

The communication mechanism between PCs is achieved by socket programming. In this project, UDP protocol is used because, in telepresence, speed is more important than reliability and accuracy. Following are the steps to connect two PCs through sockets in different networks. For connecting sockets on different networks, IP addresses and port should be opened on the server side.  With every new dynamic IP address that the computer gets, the router settings would have to be changed to forward requests to that new address. To overcome this problem, the private IP address needs to be static for a PC in the LAN.  To achieve this, the MAC address reservation on the router is a prerequisite.  To send any data to a specific device requires opening a port on a permanent private IP address which is called port forwarding.

To deal with the dynamic public IP address, DDNS (Dynamic DNS) is used which allows you to choose a unique hostname (ex: MyHome.dyndns.org) and link it to any IP-compatible device (router, webcam, etc.). As the IP addresses used to access these devices change, DDNS takes care of updating it, ensuring that server and client are always connected. Instead of using Dynamic Update Client to keep our hostname updated with the correct IP address we used the Integrated Dynamic DNS for autoconfiguration in the router. To allow connection on specific ports that are forwarded, new inbound and outbound rules in firewall need to be created to allow access to requesting device.  Server Bindings which represent the underlying address, port, and a hostname are added through IIS to allow access through hostname.

Coding is done in C++ using Visual Studio IDE. Finally, run the code after connecting the devices to the PC and teleoperation is good to go.

Benefits of the Project

• Disaster Management: In case of any disaster or fire breakout we can teleoperate from a distant location instead of assigning people these life-threatening tasks.
• Life-Threatening Jobs: A team of robots is deployed in a nuclear plant to execute scheduled operations of surveillance and security controls.
• Medical Prospects: 
  • Physiotherapy: It can be used by physiotherapists to help people in various forms of exercises
  • Surgical procedures: It can be used to perform surgeries from remote areas.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

       In places where it is impossible for humans to reach for example if people are buried under heavy debris after an earthquake or explosion etc. We need teleoperation as well as haptic feedback otherwise we might end up doing more harm than good as we would not know how much force to apply with what object especially if that object ends up being a human or animal.

        Sometimes people try to find ways around the occupational hazard considering in mind the greater goods. Companies pay more in lawsuits due to accidents than in accident prevention techniques. Herein we see a promising future for teleoperation technology like a team of robots is deployed in a nuclear plant to execute scheduled operations of surveillance and security controls.

         Teleoperation is taking everyone by storm in the medical sciences as well but here haptic feedback is extremely essential as the human body is delicate. In physiotherapy, it can be used by physiotherapists to help people in various forms of exercises and this is indeed helpful as patients are bulky and would break stereotypic views like male physiotherapists for males and vice versa.

         It can be used to perform surgeries from remote areas and complex neurosurgeries on which work is currently being done and Haptic feedback examples are available on CHAI 3D.

         The code not only makes a connection between the master and slave but also lets us feel haptic feedback from the other party where various parameters can be adjusted like stiffness and force. We even have control of whether force feedback is enabled or not on both sides.

Final Deliverable of the Project

Software System

Type of Industry

Medical , Manufacturing , Telecommunication

Technologies

Internet of Things (IoT), Robotics

Sustainable Development Goals

Good Health and Well-Being for People, Industry, Innovation and Infrastructure

Required Resources

If you need this project, please contact me on contact@adikhanofficial.com