Abstraction and reproduction of force sensation from real environment by bilateral control

In recent years, the skill preservation of an expert has been a serious problem in various fields. If digital skill preservation like a haptic database is attained, it may become an innovative solution of this problem. This paper proposes abstraction and reproduction methods on bilateral control of force sensation from the real environment and reconstruction of the real environment as well. In the abstraction mode, which is based on bilateral control with disturbance observer, "the law of action and reaction"is attained. Later, the environmental dynamical information is estimated and obtained. In the reconstruction mode, an environmental model is reconstructed based on the obtained data from the real environment. Then, in the reproduction mode, the operator would feel the force sensation from the obtained environmental model as if from the real environment. As a result, the proposed system is able to store the bilateral force sensation to a force sensation recorder. In this paper, some environmental models for the reproduction of vivid force sensation are compared experimentally. Finally, the viability of the proposed methods is shown by the experimental results.