Dynamic bilateral teleoperation of the cart-pole: A study toward the synchronization of human operator and legged robot

This letter presents the experimental evaluation of a bilateral feedback law for the teleoperation of an underactuated dynamic system: The Cart-Pole. This physical system illustrates another simple model, the Linear Inverted Pendulum (LIP); a popular template for legged robot control and, in this letter, the mapping channel between the operator and robot. We develop a scaling strategy based on geometric and kinematic similarity in order to generate dynamically feasible trajectories for the LIP with a natural frequency different than the human's. Moreover, by modifying the classic equations for the Cart-Pole, we show how it can competently represent the proposed template quantitatively and visually. Experiments where a human operator dynamically controls slave systems with slower or faster natural frequencies illustrate the efficacy of the proposed method. This study is a step toward building a human-machine interface that dynamically synchronize operator and legged robot in order to eventually achieve complex motor behaviors.