Control of Bilateral Teleoperation System Consisting of Heterogeneous Manipulators with Communication Delay

Abstract

This paper proposes a new control method for bilateral teleoperation systems with communication delay. Under the proposed control law, the passivity from external forces to velocities and the position synchronization in the working spaces are attained. The master and slave arms can have different mechanical structures and have redundant degree-of-freedom. The proposed control can work even on singular postures, because it uses no inverses of Jacobian matrices. The bad effect of the transmission delay on stability is canceled by local damping terms, since there exists a dissipativity for a supply rate on the actions of the position-signal’s delay and the local damping term. We show the property of the storage functional for the supply rate, which makes it possible to show the synchronization via Barbalat’s lemma. When both the arms are stopped, the force from the environment in the working space is properly transmitted to the other arm as the force on the operation space balancing with the human’s manipulation force.