Passive bilateral teleoperation with constant time delays

We propose a novel control framework for bilateral teleoperation of a pair of multi-degree-of-freedom (DOF) nonlinear robotic systems under constant communication delays. The proposed framework utilizes the simple proportional-derivative (PD) control, i.e. the master and slave robots are directly connected via spring and damper over the delayed communication channels. Using the controller passivity concept, the LyapunovKrasovskii technique, and Parseval's identity, we can passify the combination of the delayed communication and control blocks altogether robustly, as long as the delays are finite constants and an upper-bound for the round-trip delay is known. Having explicit position feedback through the delayed P-action, the proposed framework enforces master-slave position coordination which is often compromised in the velocity-based schemes (e.g. conventional scattering-based teleoperation). The proposed control framework provides humans with extended physiological proprioception so that s/he can affect and sense the remote slave environments mainly relying on her/his musculoskeletal systems. Experiments are performed to validate the proposed. control framework.