Bilateral Teleoperation with Compliant 6-DOF Pose-and-Force Sensing

Abstract: Existing bilateral teleoperation platforms still rely on costly rigid six-axis force/torque sensors, tightly coupled leader-follower hardware, and kilohertz control loops. We present a Cartesian bilateral framework built on the hardware-agnostic WinGs Operating Studio (WOS) middleware, in which a low-cost compliant 6-DOF pose-and-force sensing end-effector, Delta6, is mounted on both sides so that each manipulator behaves as an end-effector 6-DOF series elastic actuator (SEA). The leader runs a damping-only admittance loop with a 6-D biquad notch filter; the follower realizes a stiffness-damping impedance through a position-based outer loop with a PID wrench-to-pose mapping. Three time scales (hardware I/O, mid-rate impedance/admittance, low-rate teleoperation messages) are explicitly decoupled, enabling the same application to drive heterogeneous arms. On a Lite6/FR3 testbed at 150 Hz, the system tracks stably under delays up to $120\pm40$ ms and 1% packet loss, matches the prescribed virtual stiffness in contact, and shows a favorable cumulative energy signature in passivity-style tests.