Diagonalization of telerobotic hand controller impedance for accurate force and velocity transmission

Efficient telerobotic operation requires an intuitive transmission of forces and velocities between the master and slave manipulators. However, due to friction in the joints of each kinematic chain, the associated Cartesian space impedance matrices are not diagonal. The result is a misalignment between the applied force and resulting velocity vectors. While a force sensor on the slave is often used to provide an internal feedback to eliminate the problem for this manipulator, the same is not usually true for the master. A local feedback of available velocity and force sensory information to the master is proposed which would diagonalize its effective mechanical damping to allow a correct display of force direction information from the slave