Control of bilateral teleoperators in the operational space without velocity measurements

Abstract

This paper proposes a proportional plus damping injection (P + d) controller for bilateral teleoperators in the operational space. Unit quaternions are used to describe the end-effectors' orientation since they exhibit the well known property of being a singularity-free representation. The proposed controller does not need the measurement of the velocities, instead a passivity-based filter is used. Under the reasonable assumptions that the human operator and the environment define passive maps from force to velocity, it is proved that velocities and pose (position and orientation) errors between the local and the remote manipulators are bounded. Moreover, in the case that the human and the environment forces are zero, the velocities and pose errors converge asymptotically to zero. Finally, experimental validation using two robots of 6-Degrees-of-Freedom (DoF) shows the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.