Stable bilateral teleoperation under a time delay using a robust impedance control

This paper presents a new impedance controller for a bilateral teleoperation under a time delay. In the proposed controller, a dynamic characteristic at the operator-master (slave-environment) interface is designed by a desired master (slave) impedance model. To cope with the uncertainty in the slave, an impedance model is put into a sliding surface of a sliding-mode-controller. A stability condition is derived from absolute stability concept, and a parameter tuning algorithm is proposed using this. The validity of the proposed control scheme is demonstrated by experiments with a 1-DOF master/slave system. Experimental results show that the proposed control method works well with robustness.