Multilateral Control Architecture Research Articles

Multilateral Teleoperation Over Communication Time Delay Using the Time-Domain Passivity Approach

A general framework to stabilize multilateral teleoperation system over a communication time delay based on the well-known time-domain passivity approach (TDPA) is proposed. The uniqueness of this framework is that it is independent of the amount of communication time delay, the multilateral control architecture, and the number of masters and slaves. The multilateral system was first decoupled into subsystems with respect to each terminal by identifying the input signals’ contributions to the output terminals, which was not straightforward due to the coupled nature of the multilateral teleoperation system. The decoupled subsystems were then converted into an electrical circuit using a mechanical–electrical analogy. Time-delay power network (TDPN) was introduced to clarify active energy sources from the time delay and passivity observer/passivity controller (PO/PC) was utilized to dissipate those active energies. A less-conservative method compared with prior work was proposed to guarantee the stability. Experiments with a trilateral teleoperation system and with a multilateral teleoperation system with a dual master and dual slave were conducted to validate the proposed framework.

Three-channel control architecture for multilateral teleoperation under time delay

Multilateral teleoperation is an extension of bilateral/haptic teleoperation framework to multiple operators/robots and finds applications in haptic training. As in bilateral teleoperation, time delay is an important problem, and stability and transparency, which quantifies the performance of the teleoperation system, are critical in the design of multilateral control systems. This paper proposes a novel three-channel-based multilateral control architecture with damping injection to guarantee delay-independent L 2 stability and high transparency in multilateral teleoperation systems. The theoretical and computational analyses are verified with experiment results.