Switching Robust Control for Transparent and Stable Teleoperation

The inherent transparency-stability trade-off in bilateral teleoperation poses a challenge to design controllers that find a proper balance between both requirements. Furthermore, when the environment of the teleoperation system varies within a wide range, a single controller might no be sufficient to achieve both stability and transparency. Therefore, we propose the synthesis of a switching robust controller that guarantees both stability and transparency for a predefined range of environment stiffness. Moreover, we take into account during the design process the fact that environment estimators will have limited accuracy due to noise and uncertainty. Subsequently, we show the potential of the approach by numerical simulation of a 1-DOF teleoperated system.