Abstract
During the last twenty years several different methods for presenting reaction forces to operators have been proposed for improving the performance of teleoperation. In most of these methods, some kind of a link mechanism with actuators is used to present the reaction forces. This results in a large and complicated system because the link mechanism should have the same number of active joints as the teleoperated robot. So to overcome this difficulty we propose a new method in which the functional electrical stimulation technique of muscles is used to present the reaction forces to the operator. Muscle forces can be generated artificially by functional electrical stimulation, which means that the operator can feel the generated forces as virtual reaction forces. In this paper the proposed man-machine interface is described, and the experimental results obtained using a teleoperated construction machine are given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.
