Design and Control of a Wearable Upper-Limb Exoskeleton Featuring Force Feedback for Teleoperation

In highly dynamic and unstructured environments, existing intelligent robots often face significant challenges when performing specific tasks, such as adapting to unpredictable changes, handling a wide variety of obstacles, and maintaining operational accuracy under variable conditions. The motion capture devices, which can capture human movements and provide feedback, offer an effective solution to these challenges. Integrating the human operator into the control loop in this manner allows the controlled robot to act as an extension of the human body, sensing the environment and executing tasks accordingly. This paper presents the development of the Wearable Upper-Limb Exoskeleton Featuring Force Feedback, a seven-degree-of-freedom exoskeleton interactive device that closely conforms to the human body. The exoskeleton is user-friendly and efficiently records upper limb movement data. Kinematic analysis reveals that the exoskeleton's workspace is highly compatible with the human upper limb, offering excellent operability across various postures. Furthermore, we adopted an incremental motion mapping approach for teleoperation. Experiments were conducted to demonstrate that the exoskeleton accurately captures human motion. The results showed that this system ensures effective robot follow-through and enables operators to smoothly control a remote robot in executing predefined target tasks.