Advancing Robot Interaction Safety: A Teleoperated Shared-Control Approach Using a Lightweight Force-Feedback Exoskeleton

Tele-homecare has become a promising approach to meet the growing demand for elderly and disability care. In such a context, ensuring human-robot interaction safety during teleoperation poses a critical challenge. Existing teleoperation control approaches focus solely on the robot’s end-effector trajectory, failing to handle inevitable or even desirable contacts on other robot links. This paper proposes a teleoperated shared-control strategy to deal with this challenge. A lightweight exoskeleton is developed to teleoperate the robot and give force feedback to the operator. Additionally, an exoskeleton-based shared-control strategy is proposed to integrate operator commands with real-time proximity sensing information, allowing the robot to avoid collisions while executing tasks. To react to inevitable contact, the force feedback function is incorporated into the proposed strategy to enable the operator to experience intuitive contact. Comparative experiments and a demonstration are designed to evaluate the feasibility and reliability of the proposed strategy in a tele-homecare scenario. Compared to the traditional teleoperation strategy, the proposed method can greatly reduce the contact forces on the robot’s links, indicating the potential of the proposed strategy in advancing safety in tele-homecare systems.