Decentralized robust control for teleoperated needle insertion with uncertainty and communication delay

An iterative synthesizing strategy for robust force reflecting control of a Haptic exploration device is proposed. The proposed strategy guarantees the robust stability of the closed loop system with respect to uncertainties caused by the robot dynamics and environmental impedance as well as time-varying communication delays. In order to achieve the stability and performance objectives of the teleoperation system through a multiobjective optimization framework, a suboptimal robust controller is obtained with guaranteed global stability. Under a decentralized structure, the proposed approach provides a systematic design framework using H-infinity robust approach in the presence of interconnection in the structure. Through experimental results, the improved performance of the proposed approach is demonstrated. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.