Bilateral control for 4-DOF manipulator with a tendon-driven spherical joint mechanism

Master-slave robots with transmission of force sensation have gotten a lot of attention in the supporting surgery or searching danger area. The operators feel force sensation acting on slave robots by handling master robots. The transmission is realized by 4ch-bilateral control. In order to put the system into the practical use, bilateral control for multi degrees-of-freedom robots with lightweight mechanisms is desired. Therefore, in this research, bilateral control for 4 degrees-of-freedom manipulator with a tendon-driven spherical joint mechanism in the edge of 2 degrees-of-freedom parallel link manipulator is proposed. In addition, tension control is utilized to avoid strings from slacking. The experimental results show that the transmission of force sensation with the manipulator was realized.