Telefunctioning: An Approach to Telerobotic Manipulations

This article introduces three concepts: 1) "telefunctioning", 2) a control method for achieving telefunctioning, and 3) an approach to the analysis of human-robot interaction when telefunctioning governs the system behavior. Telefunctioning facilitates maneuvering of loads by creating a perpetual sense of the load dynamics for the operator. We define telefunctioning as a robotic manipulation method in which the dynamic behaviors of the slave robot and the master robot are functions of each other; these functions are the designer\´s choice and depend on the application. In a subclass of telefunctioning called telepresence, all of the relationships between the master and the slave are specified as "unity" so that all of the master and slave variables (e.g., position, velocity) are dynamically equal. To create telefunctioning, we arrive at a minimum number of functions relating the robots\´ variables. We then develop a control architecture which guarantees that the defined functions govern the dynamic behavior of the system. The stability of the closed-loop system (master robot, slave robot, human, and the load being manipulated) is analyzed and sufficient conditions for stability are derived.