3. Teleimpedance: Teleoperation with Impedance Regulation Using a Body-Machine Interface

Master-Slave teleoperation systems for unstructured and hostile environments have been studied and applied for a long time, starting even before the emergence of robotics systems [101]. Earlier prototypes using position measurements from the human operator arm to be replicated by a rigid manipulator soon showed their limitations in dealing with interaction tasks in uncertain environments, due to high forces developing at contacts. The second generation of teleoperation systems therefore included means of feeding back to the operator information on the interaction forces between the slave robot and the remote environment. Although such bilateral teleoperation systems can outperform pure position—controlled ones, they require an active force display on the master side (e.g., an actuated exoskeleton), which imposes extra costs and discomfort for the operator. Furthermore, latencies in the communication channel between the master and slave robot may generate insufficient transparency or even stability issues in the bilateral teleoperation system (see e.g. [38, 102, 103]).