Design and Experimental Validation of Sensorless 4-Channel Bilateral Teleoperation for Low-Cost Manipulators

Abstract

Teleoperation of low-cost manipulators is attracting increasing attention as a practical means of collecting demonstration data for imitation learning. However, most existing low-cost systems rely on unilateral position control without force feedback, while implementing force-feedback bilateral teleoperation is difficult because low-cost manipulators typically have low-resolution encoders and no joint torque sensors. This paper presents a sensorless 4-channel bilateral teleoperation framework that integrates identified nonlinear dynamics compensation with a disturbance-observer-based velocity and external-force estimation scheme. By interpreting the observer structure in the frequency domain, we clarify the coupling between the velocity- and external-force-estimation bandwidths and derive practical tuning guidelines based on the damping ratio and a single cutoff frequency. Real-robot experiments, including force-sensor comparison and teleoperation tasks, demonstrate that the proposed framework provides practically useful force estimates and enables stable teleoperation in high-speed and contact-rich scenarios under low-cost hardware constraints. As an application, imitation-learning experiments demonstrate that incorporating estimated force information into demonstrations improves task success rates in the tested contact-rich manipulation tasks.