Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

SUMMARY

This paper presents a new teleoperation system with improved intuitive design for assisting the operators to perform accurate and precise manual tasks by exploiting the forces of robotic manipulator and providing additional safety to the operator, the robot and the environment. The control system monitors the latest state of the robot and its virtual environment continuously. Additionally, a virtual environment-induced haptic feedback and physical sensor-induced haptic feedback have been integrated to the system.

Structure and Related Work

The paper is very well written in clear English, and the structure is easy to follow. Related work is almost sufficient, however the authors should highlight the novelty of the papers and the advancements beyond the state of the art. For example, the system uses the commercial Geomagic Touch Interface, which are specifically the functions implemented beyond the build-in ones? Moreover, which are the advancements compared to other relevant systems commercial and research ones? I think that there will be space for adding more references to support novelty and system’s contributions.

 

TECHNICAL ACCURACY

The teleoperation system presented in this paper seems accurate and refers to an interesting topic. The results are quite interesting and well presented. The assessment and validation of the system in two tasks and the graphs from the questionnaires are very sufficient. However, more emphasis should be given to the contributions and the advancements beyond the state of the art.

Comments

-        First sentence of Related work can be merged with the first paragraph.

-        The diagram of the control system (Figure 1) can be improved aesthetically and grammatically. Please choose horizontal alignment (haptic generator and keyboard input are un-aligned). Confirm also the directions of the arrows and rephrase some blocks if needed.

-        Table 2 and Figure 12 present the same data if I understood well, so better to keep one of them. The same with table 4 and Figure 14.

-        In table 3, why the 2^nd column is empty?

-        In general, the length of the paper can be shortening significantly: Figure 4 can be eliminated (it is not informative for the reader). Figs 5 and 7 can be horizontal subfigures.

-        Section 4 should be renamed to “Conclusions”.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript describes a system for haptic teleoperation of industrial robots. The work is well explained, though the contributions are quite limited or minor.

Here I provide some comments:

In page 6, section 2.2.1, the authors check the determinant of the Jacobian matrix to prevent singularities, using a threshold-value. As far as I know, the determinant of the Jacobian matrix can be negative. So I guess that the authors check the absolute value of the determinant of the Jacobian matrix. If this is true, the authors should mention this fact.

Fig. 5 shows some experimental values and a quadratic curve to fit them. Somehow I think that the fit could be much better if the first point (0.00 , 0.00) is not taken into account. In fact, I can’t imagine any experiment pushing the robot with 0 m/s. Nevertheless, if point (0.00 , 0.00) is valid from a theoretical point of view, I think that a simple linear fit with th_dist = c_1 * vel + c_0 could give a similar good fit than the quadratic one.

In this Fig. 5, I guess that the units of the distance threshold are meters. Please, include them.

The minus sign in equation (11) is the same minus sign in equation (12)? If both minus sign are different and correctly written, then I guess that the result of minus plus minus is just a positive value.

In Page 9, I read “This issue was unfortunately to large to fix in time and reprogramming and optimisation of this functionality is therefore added as future work.” Maybe the authors would like to say “too large”? Nevertheless, I found this justification quite poor.

Sometimes the font size of the figures are very small. In particular the axis of Fig. 8 and Fig. 11.

In my opinion, receiving 2 outliers out of 14 experiments (Fig. 12) is excessive. You are discarding 14% of the participants.

The “discussion” section is just a “conclusion” section summarizing the paper. Not discussing anything.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper presented a teleoperation control architecture which is made for 6 DoF industrial manipulators. The topic is interesting. The paper has a well-written introduction which clearly elaborated on the existing challenges and current research achievements. The implementation details were presented so the reviewer encourage the author to make the system open-sourced. The results looked reasonable. Some minor comments are listed below:

- The size of Fig. 2 could be reduced since the photo of Geomagic Touch seemed a bit large.

- Fig. 4 is vague, labels are needed to explain every element.

- How were the parameters in equation 10 obtained? Same for equation 12.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf