Energy Consumption Perspective of Bilateral Control Architectures

Recent advancements in different fields such as computing technologies and fast communication channels has lead to increased interest in master-slave systems and their various applications for teleoperation field. When investigating master-slave systems, the general approach points towards better performance, where major concerns are stability and transparency of the system. This has lead to a large amount of different control schemes that intend to optimise only these aspects. This paper presents a different strategy that focus on the energy consumption perspective across some of the most common bilateral architectures proposed in the literature. In particular, special attention to the slave subsystem is paid since new applications are emerging for mobile platforms but are restricted in autonomy, due to the limited battery power of the system. In this paper a halt and switch process between the bilateral control architectures has been implemented where the goal is to increase the system performance while intending to minimise power consumption. This work can be extended for fault detection and failure prediction during preventive maintenance. The results presented can also be extended to fixed slave arms to reduce their energy demand footprint. The study is done using a 1 degree of freedom (DOF) Master-Slave test bed but the results and conclusions herein presented are applicable to more complex robot systems with multiple DOF.