Back to Research Teleoperation & HRI

Teleoperation & Human-Robot Interaction

The most important property of any teleoperation system is intuitive control. Teleoperation is the key that opens environments beyond human reach — surgical cavities, hazardous sites, large structures no hand could navigate directly. But this only works if the operator can focus entirely on the task, not on the interface. And once you have genuinely intuitive control, it unlocks everything else: robot learning from human demonstration, soft and reconfigurable bodies that a human can still command naturally, and multi-arm systems that one person can supervise.

Intuitive control is the foundation for:

Robot Learning
Learning on Physically Adaptive Systems
Human demonstrations become training data — only possible when control is natural enough to capture intent.
Explore → Soft Robotics
Soft & Compliant Robotic Systems
Compliant bodies behave differently under force — the interface must translate human intent across that gap.
Explore → Multi-Robot Systems
Multi-Robot Collaboration
One human supervising many arms requires control abstractions that scale without growing cognitive load.
Explore →
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The Foundation: Full 6-DoF Control

The minimum requirement for any meaningful teleoperation is full six-degree-of-freedom control — position and orientation, simultaneously, with a single hand. Achieving this intuitively means the mapping from hand motion to robot motion must feel direct and transparent, with no perceptible lag or axis confusion. This work develops a compact teleoperation controller that delivers full 6-DoF input while remaining small enough for surgical-scale tasks, validated across large-scale cable robot platforms.

HH Cheng, J Hughes — 8-DoFs Cable Driven Parallel Robots for Bimanual Teleoperation. IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, 2025
Q Guan, HH Cheng, B Dai, J Hughes — Control the Soft Robot Arm with its Physical Twin. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2025
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Beyond 6-DoF: Commanding Redundant Joints

A 6-DoF input fully specifies end-effector pose — but many real robots have more joints than that. Redundant degrees of freedom allow the robot to change its elbow posture, avoid obstacles, or optimise joint limits while holding the same tip position. The challenge is giving the human a natural way to command this extra freedom without breaking the simplicity of the core interface. The idea is to extend the control framework to handle redundancy resolution, letting the operator influence arm configuration without thinking in joint angles.

HH Cheng, J Hughes — Enhancing Bimanual Teleoperation with Variable Shoulder Distance: Manipulation in Varying-Scale of Applications. npj Robotics, 2025
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Closing the Loop: Haptic Feedback

Vision alone is not enough. When a surgical instrument contacts tissue, or a cable robot reaches a tension limit, the operator needs to feel it — as they may not see it. Haptic feedback closes the sensory loop and makes remote manipulation feel grounded in physical reality. In this system, force feedback is already integrated, so the controller operates as a two-way channel: intent flows to the robot, and contact information flows back to the human hand.

Force Feedback Integration
Implemented on the teleoperation device, with haptic feedback already integrated to render contact and force information back to the operator.
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Where This Is Going

Three directions on the horizon that build directly on this foundation:

VR Vision & Immersive Telepresence
Pairing the teleoperation controller with stereoscopic VR headsets to give the operator a first-person view from the robot's perspective. The goal is to recreate the sensation of being physically present at the robot's location — critical for surgical and inspection tasks where spatial depth perception matters.
Adaptive User Interfaces
Control interfaces that adjust to the user — presenting different levels of abstraction for novice vs. expert operators, switching autonomy levels dynamically, and surfacing only the information relevant to the current task phase. The aim is a system that grows with the operator rather than forcing them to adapt to it.
Finger & Hand Feedback Glove
Extending haptic feedback beyond the wrist to individual fingers — a instrumented glove that renders contact forces and texture at the fingertip level, enabling dexterous manipulation tasks where whole-hand feel matters as much as gross position control.