Development of isomorphic master-slave robots with modular method

Abstract

Developed with traditional method, most of the current existing master robots lack of sufficient flexibility and high adaptability to the slave robots, since their structure and degrees of freedom cannot be modified according to those of the slaves. To overcome these shortcomings with the existing master robots, we propose a novel master robot developed with modular method. With the modular approach, it is trivial to build isomorphic master-slave robots according to different tasks. For such isomorphic systems, the mapping between the master and the slave is one-to-one owing to their same configurations, which leads to simple, intuitive and stable control of the slave. In this paper, we introduce the development of the master-slave robotic system, focusing on the design method, the mechanical system, the control system including the hardware and software of the modules, and the communication between the master and slave. An experiment with the master-slave system performing a manipulation task in practice is carried out to illustrate the effectiveness of the presented modular method and the built master-slave system.