Bilateral teleoperation with delayed force feedback using time domain passivity controller

Time delay is a long standing impediment of bilateral control and can destabilize the system evidently. This paper presents a mode-based approach to alleviate some of the problems associated with time delays in a master-slave robot system. The originality of the approach proposed mainly lies in its capacity to take into account explicitly the slave force feedback modified according to the output of Passivity Observer (PO). This method consists of a virtual slave environment model together with a PO to calculate the system energy on the master side. The local environment model is built by the parameters that are identified online at the slave side. Simulation results show the superior performance of the proposed control scheme in the presence of time delays. Experimental results, using a 1-DOF master-slave teleoperation system, support this conclusion.