JOURNAL OF LATEX CLASS FILES 1 Design and Instrumentation of Force Feedback in

Abstract — The design and instrumentation of force feedback (FF) is presented for a networked telerobotic system that consists of a Master Arm Client Station (MACS) and a Slave Arm Server Station (SASS). A motion coordination system maps the operator hand at MACS, to a user defined floating tool frame at SASS. Variational analysis for a wrist force sensor allows evaluating the force at a floating point of the tool frame. Force is streamed from SASS to MACS where it is displayed on the operator hand. Performance evaluation of contact with the environment is presented. First, a user-controlled teleoperation with FF is described. Contact instabilities are observed in pre-contact and post-contact phases. Second, a programmed compliance loop is implemented at SASS by selectively converting sensed forces into corrective motion which allows minimizing contact forces. Third, a supervisory mechanism based on a user-controlled Active Compliance is presented. High FF gain improves operator sensitivity but may cause instability in the case of contact with stiff environment. Motion mapping minimizes the number of trials to set up the tool configuration. Light and stiff arms are highly recommended to reduce the degradation in telerobotic synchronization caused by elasticity in linkage transmission and by the network delays. Active compliance at the slave arm improved contact stability and provided an effective supervisory control. Index Terms — Distributed application framework, reflected force feedback, man-machine interface, Telerobotics