Teleoperations with shared explicit contact force control

In this paper the development of a master-slave robotics system is presented. This development is part of a research project devoted to the intelligent automation of in-service inspection of welded seams in nuclear plants using non- destructive ultrasonic based techniques. The main feature of the system is a shared explicit control scheme of the contact force during the interaction of the end-effector with the remote environment. This unilateral master-slave operational scheme does not suffer from the drawbacks of the bilateral force reflection based implementation. Moreover it avoids the operator from damaging the remote manipulator during wrong maneuvers due to imperfect video feedback. The paper describes the control structure applied (belonging to the class of explicit force control) and the hardware-software architecture of the system. Experimental results are given on the Ansaldo Olasand manipulator.