A bilateral teleoperation with interaction force constraint in unknown environment using non linear model predictive control

In critical scenarios, the interaction forces between a robot and the environment could lead to damages and dangerous situations. Complex tasks like grasping fragile objects or physical human-robot interaction in collaborative robotics require the capability of controlling forces. In bilateralteleoperation, force feedback is used to providetelepresenceto the operator. In such situation, the force is commonly measured by a force/torque sensor at theend effectorof the remote robot. Even if force feedback allows the operator to feel the interaction with the environment this does not prevent unsafe motion. In this paper, we propose amodel predictive control(MPC) based bilateral teleoperation able to guarantee safe interaction with the environment by constraining the forces. The method does not assume any prior knowledge of the environment.