Intercontinental Cooperative Telemanipulation between Germany and Japan Angelika Peer, Sandra Hirche, Carolina Weber, Inga Krause, Martin Buss Institute of Automatic Control Engineering, Technische Universit¨ at M¨ unchen, Munich, Germany angelika.peer@tum.de, hirche@tum.de, weber.carolina@gmx.de, ingakrause1@gmx.de, mb@tum.de Sylvain Miossec, Paul Evrard, Olivier Stasse, Ee Sian Neo, Abderrahmane Kheddar, Kazuhito Yokoi JRL AIST/CNRS, Tsukuba, Japan sylvain.miossec, evrard.paul, olivier.stasse, rio.neo, abderrahmane.kheddar, kazuhito.yokoi @aist.go.jp The video shows an intercontinental cooperative telema- nipulation task, whereby the operator site is located in Mu- nich, Germany and the teleoperator site in Tsukuba, Japan. The human operator controls a remotely located teleoperator, which performs a task in the remote environment. Hereby the human operator is assisted by another person located at the remote site. The task consists in jointly grasping an object, moving it to a new position and finally releasing it, see Fig. 1. Fig. 1. Cooperative telemanipulation task: approach, grasp, lift, put down object gripper cameras for stereo view telemanipulator Fig. 2. Remote site: HRP-2 collaborating with a local human The concept of telemanipulation can be formulated as follows: A human operator interacts with a human-system interface and controls a remotely located telemanipulator. Visual, auditory and haptic information is exchanged be- tween master and slave devices. In this experiment a force- position control architecture has been implemented whereby forces are send from master to slave and positions from slave to master. Additional information is provided to control the robot’s head and grippers. For visual feedback a video stream is transmitted to the operator side. Since master and slave are located at different continents one of the main challenges in this experiment is the huge time delay of the communication channel. Information is exchanged via UDP/IP with an approximate roundtrip time of about 280ms. This relative big time-delay requires the implementation of a high mass and damping factor at slave side that limits the bandwidth of the system significantly and thus ensures stability of the overall teleoperation sytem, see [1] for more details. head tracker head mounted display linear potentiometer haptic interface Fig. 3. Operator site: human operator and human-system-interface The remote site, see Fig. 2, is located in Tsukuba/Japan and as teleoperator the humanoid robot HRP-2 is used [2]– [4]. The robot arms have six degrees of freedom and are equipped with one degree of freedom grippers. With its 2 degrees of freedom the robot’s head can pan and tilt. The operator site, see Fig. 3, is located in Mu- nich/Germany. As a haptic interface the redundant device ViSHaRD7 with 7 degrees of freedom is used [5]. The head orientation of the operator is additionally tracked such that the robot’s head with its camera follows the movements of 2008 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems Acropolis Convention Center Nice, France, Sept, 22-26, 2008 978-1-4244-2058-2/08/$25.00 ©2008 IEEE. 2715