A Compliant Partitioned Shared Control Strategy for an Orbital Robot

Abstract

In this letter, a novel partitioned shared controller is proposed, which exploits a fully-actuated orbital robot to perform a primary end-effector task involving environmental interactions. This task is remotely performed using a bilateral teleoperation controller, while a secondary task is automatically controlled in situ for operational safety in a partitioned manner. In particular, the proposed method is derived as a modified 4-Channel teleoperation architecture. The orbital robot’s momentum and shape (joints) dynamics are exploited to benefit the controller design. Asymptotic stability and finite-gain L2-stability are proved in the absence and presence of external interactions, respectively. Furthermore, the proposed method is validated experimentally on a hardware-in-the-loop facility.