An active inceptor is a sidestick equipped with electromechanical actuators that provide programmable haptic feedback, offering pilots a tangible sense of control and enhancing their situational awareness. By integrating real-time force feedback mechanisms, active inceptors aim to improve handling qualities, reduce pilot workload, and support safer operations, particularly under dynamic or degraded flight conditions. Unlike conventional passive sidesticks, active inceptor systems (AIS) enable adaptive cueing strategies that respond to flight dynamics, control surface behaviour, and flight control laws. This review paper examines the evolving role of AIS in fly-by-wire (FBW) architectures and emerging aircraft control systems. It outlines fundamental design philosophies, summarises recent research and case studies, analyses its integration within flight control architectures, and reviews existing certification and regulatory considerations influencing AIS deployment. In addition, the paper explores potential handling quality assessment frameworks applicable to AIS. While the primary focus of this paper is the AIS application on fixed-wing aircraft, the review also highlights its established and emerging use in rotorcraft, offers insights into potential directions for future research and integration into next-generation flight platforms.

Minimally invasive surgery (MIS) has been an essential tool in the surgical sector for many years due to its crucial advantages compared to open surgery. To overcome remaining limitations, teleoperated MIS experienced a strong emergence. However, the widespread usage of such systems is hindered by the enormous financial hurdle. The use of standard components and conventional tools for teleoperated MIS can facilitate integration into existing hospital workflows and can be a cost-efficient and versatile approach for research purposes. To compensate for the lack of haptic feedback, some teleoperation setups inherit a sensor system allowing them to record interaction forces and display them at the user interface. In research and in commercially available systems, different positions for the sensor can be found. In this paper, mechanical interfaces for the guidance and actuation of non-wristed and wristed standard instruments are presented. Furthermore, a method for the extracorporeal measurement of interaction forces is presented, characterized, and discussed. The overall mean relative error of the magnitude of the interaction force is 9.4%, while the overall mean absolute error of the force vector is 14.4$^{\circ }$, both below the respective human differential perception threshold. The presented measurement method is a simple, yet sufficiently accurate approach to measure interaction forces in surgical telemanipulation.

This paper investigates a battery snap-in operation performed by an industrial robot. The snap-fit phenomenon is experienced during the insertion of batteries into the battery holder. In order to understand the nature of the snap-fit phenomenon, the large displacement but small deformation theory is used to model the insertion operation. The stability of equilibrium points is analysed in order to determine the so-called trip point. The purpose of the investigation is to augment the displacement control of the robot with force feedback. A microcontroller-based measurement system is implemented to provide the force feedback. The proposed method is valid for a class of snap-fit problems not only for the investigated specific one.

Haptic devices have proven effective in stimulating proprioceptive sensing in post-stroke patients. In this work, pre-existing devices were used together in a remote environment for the teleassessment of impaired hands. A four-channel bilateral control system in the presence of large and variable time delay is proposed as a proof of concept. Time delay is managed with a novel communication disturbance observer (CDOB). The system also employed a scaling down compensation value (SDCV) for the CDOB. The proposed control system was tested successfully in bilateral haptic interaction, simulating a remote motor and functional evaluation of patients' hands, guaranteeing safe and stable interaction, even in the presence of large network delays.

This paper proposes a control scheme applied to the delayed bilateral teleoperation of mobile robots with force feedback in face of asymmetric and time-varying delays. The scheme is managed by a velocity PD-like control plus impedance and a force feedback based on damping and synchronization error. A fictitious force, depending on the robot motion and its environment, is used to avoid possible collisions. In addition, the stability of the system is analyzed from which simple conditions for the control parameters are established in order to assure stability. Finally, the performance of the delayed teleoperation system is shown through experiments where a human operator drives a mobile robot.

In this paper, an adaptive force reflection scheme is proposed for bilateral teleoperation. In order to achieve an ideal telepresence performance while keeping the system stable, the force reflection algorithm needs to take both the human force and the contact force into consideration. An observer based on the feature of the human operator is designed to estimate the force applied on the master device. The reflected force is calculated by performing the orthogonal decomposition of the contact force, and is adjusted adaptively according to the estimated human force. The direction of the reflected force becomes a key consideration in the design process, so the proposed approach has an advantage in the guiding contact task. Based on the small gain theorem, the master device with the force reflection scheme is proved to be input-to-output stable, and the derivation for stability criterion of the closed-loop teleoperation system is also given. The results of simulations and experiments on a 6-degree of freedom teleoperation system demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.

This paper proposes a prediction system and a command fusion to help the human operator in a teleoperation system of a mobile robot with time-varying delay and force feedback. The command fusion is used to join a remote controller and the delayed user's commands. Besides, a predictor is proposed since the future trajectory of the mobile robot is not known a priori being it decided online by the user. The command fusion and predictor are designed based on the time delay and the current context measured through the crash probability. Finally, the proposed scheme is tested from teleoperation experiments considering time-varying delay as well as force feedback.

Complex tasks that need to be performed through teleoperation led to the development of multifinger robot hands. A dextrous master is a multi-DOF controller which is worn by the operator in order to teleoperate these anthropomorphic hands. Force feedback is very useful when there is interaction with the environment. Providing force feedback to dextrous masters is an area of active research. We outline some of the human factors that influence the design of such masters. Of obvious importance is the hand geometry and the desired number of degrees of freedom. Additional criteria relate to the force perception of the hand. Finally, the man-machine impedance is of importance, since at the man/machine interface there are two impedances acting in series. One is the effective impedance of the human operator holding the master controller, the second is the impedance of the master controller being manipulated.

The control stategy for a dextrous masters is different from the general case of bilateral teleoperation since it models the human hand in much more detail. Such a model is discussed together with the selection of actuators used for force feedback control. Existing prototypes of dextrous masters with force feedback are then reviewed. These are the Servo Controlled Manipulator Device, the Portable Dextrous Force Feedback Master (P.D.M.F.F.), the Remote Handler, and the Advanced Multiple DOF Force Reflective Hand/Wrist Master.

This paper explores a new type of a parallel platform human interface manipulator based on virtual reality (VR) for mechanism design applications. A motion control of a six-link robot manipulator actuated by three active joints is presented here. The main components of the system include a user interface, a software simulating the environment, and a VR control system. The model of the VR system is built based on a force feedback behavior that enables the operator to feel the actual force feedback from the virtual environment just as he/she would from the real environment. A primary stabilizing controller is used to develop a haptic interface device where realistic simulations of the dynamic interaction forces between a human operator and the simulated virtual object/mechanism is required. The stability and performance of the system are studied and analyzed based on the Nyquist stability criterion. Experiments on cutting virtual clay are used to validate the theoretical developments. It was shown that the experimental and theoretical results are in good agreement.

A control structure for the bilateral teleoperation of mobile robots, with tactile feedback and visual information of the interaction force is proposed in this paper. Also an impedance controller is implemented in the mobile robot structure that guarantees the linear velocity be within a desired fixed range without saturation in the actuators. To illustrate the performance of the proposed control structure, experiments on a Pioneer 2 mobile robot teleoperated with a commercial joystick with force feedback are shown.