Controller designs for bilateral teleoperation with input saturation

Input saturation raises a stability issue in a bilateral teleoperation system when a master robot whose motion is induced by a human operator moves fast in abnormal situation and a slave robot cannot follow the motion command due to the input saturation. In this paper, we conduct rigorous stability analyses of the teleoperation system under the input saturation. We first extend analysis of teleoperation scheme proposed in Chopra and Spong (2004) to a case of the input saturation, in which analysis is valid for a local operation region whose size is dependent on the input capacity. We further develop a new control scheme that guarantees the stability for a global operation region. Therefore, the proposed control scheme can deal with extreme cases, e.g., the speed of motion of the master robot can be substantially greater than the actuator capability of the slave robot. Simulations and experiments are subsequently conducted to verify the effectiveness of the analyses.