Teleoperation using passive control and LUNA network channels

This is the report of a master thesis project executed at the Robotics and Mechatronics (RaM) group at the University of Twente. In the project, two research lines are combined. i-Botics is a joint innovation center with current research on teleoperation systems. Teleoperation is the control of a robot at a remote location by a human user. Usually, position of the robot is controlled by the user and the user receives force feedback of interaction between the robot and the remote environment. The other research line is focused on design of embedded control software for robotic applications. A certain way of working is developed at the RaMgroup. The TERRA tool and LUNA software framework are created to support this method. Recently, the LUNA framework is complementedwith network channels, which enable the design of systems distributed over multiple PC’s via a network. An example of such a system is a teleoperation system. The goal of this project is to design, implement and test a teleoperation system to assess the suitability of LUNA network channels for teleoperation. Properties of the LUNA network channels that could limit the performance of a teleoperation system are introduced time delays and limited data transfer rate.