Nonlinear adaptive control of master-slave system in teleoperation

This paper is devoted to the nonlinear control design problem to achieve stability of master-slave manipulators in teleoperation system and its transparency in the sense of motion/force tracking. Nonlinear adaptive controllers are bilaterally designed for both master and slave sites to guarantee the stability of whole system and motion tracking performance. Global boundedness of the overall adaptive system and asymptotic motion (velocity/position) tracking are established. Especially, the concept of "virtual master manipulator" is introduced to increase degree of freedom of control design for force tracking performance. The resulting force tracking error depends only on the acceleration of the designed virtual master manipulator. Accurate dynamic parameters of manipulators, their acceleration information as well as models of human operator and environment are not required in the control design. Another important feature of our approach is the relaxation for the trade-off between motion and force tracking performances. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.