Seminar Homepage
This Week's Seminar
Last Week's Seminar
Seminar Archive
Spring 1998 Schedule

Warning
This page is provided for historical and archival purposes only. While the seminar dates are correct, we offer no guarantee of informational accuracy or link validity. Contact information for the speakers, hosts and seminar committee are certainly out of date.

Haptic interface and controller design for transparent teleoperation

Tim Salcudean
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
The University of British Columbia

Place and Time
Adamson Wing, Baker Hall
Refreshments 3:15 pm
Talk 3:30 pm

Abstract
Teleoperation in distant, scaled or virtual environments has many applications, from microsurgery to manufacturing and mining. The level of teleoperation transparency that can be achieved depends on the haptic interface used as a master, the dynamic properties of the teleoperation slave or virtual environment, and the teleoperation controller. Following a survey of activities in our laboratory, this talk will address issues of haptic interface and teleoperation controller design. A 6-DOF desk-top magnetically-levitated joystick with efficient actuation and a 5-DOF haptic pen with a large workspace will be described, stressing the use of general optimization-based methodologies in their design. Mechanism isotropy and issues of scaling will be discussed. Approaches to the design of transparent teleoperation controllers will be addressed next. Tradeoffs of transparency versus robustness will be examined for fixed controllers and issues of design and implementation of adaptive controllers will be addressed. Simulations and experimental results with various systems will be presented.

Speaker Biography
Tim Salcudean is an Associate Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of British Columbia. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from U.C. Berkeley, after which he spent three years as a Research Staff Member in the robotics group at the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center. During his first sabbatical, he was a visiting scientist at ONERA-CERT in Toulouse, France, and held a Killam Research Fellowship. His research interests are in haptic interfaces, teleoperation and virtual environments, and optimization-based controller design and tuning. He is pursuing applications to medical diagnosis and surgery and to the control of excavator-type machines. He is a Fellow of the British Columbia Advanced Systems Institute and an Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation.

Speaker Appointments
For appointments, please contact the host, Ralph Hollis, at rhollis@cs.cmu.edu.