Bilateral Teleop Arms

Weekend project of some bilateral teleoperation arms inspired by Ben’s.

The basic idea is that with this pair of arms, a user can manipulate either arm and feel the forces felt by the other arm. At this scale and setup, its just an interesting desk toy, but by scaling an arm and putting it elsewhere, bilateral teleoperation can be extremely useful for getting human control in environments where we don’t want humans (ex: welding or manufacturing), or in environments where humans can’t be (ex: surgery, nuclear reactors).

The demo works by utilizing two high bandwidth PD control loops trying to control each arm to the other arm’s position.

Nothing special hardware wise. The picture shows the simple GUI and live plotter that can be used to run the arms and monitor them. Video shows the 3d visualizer I made based on a 3d game engine. The controller includes a safe start up mode so that the arms don’t snap to each other at startup.