Wave-based passive control for transparent micro-teleoperation system

A wave-based bilateral controller for a micro-teleoperation system is presented for stability and transparency via a passivity approach. We showed that the application of wave variable formalism allows the passivity of the system in spite of external perturbations and environment uncertainties. While most of the existing wave-based approach assumes LTI and fixed time-delay, this paper extends the research domain to a scaled teleoperation system with variable time-delay, asymmetric gains in force and velocity variables or model uncertainties in the microenvironment. Based on the wave-based analysis of a time-varying system, a variable gain controller is proposed in order to guarantee the passivity of the system. Furthermore, in scaled teleoperation there exist positive gain matrices (scaling position and force factors) that preserve its passivity only if gain matrices are equal, which is hard to find in a real system. In case the equality condition is not satisfied, we introduced filter functions with a set of conditions for two operating cases: a structurally dominated system and a surface-dominated system. Finally, as the nonlinear nature of small scale environments with unknown dynamic passivity condition can not be satisfied, we analyzed the constraints inevitably occurring in a micro-teleoperation system and derived conditions between the parameters. The stability is analyzed based on the passivity of the resultant operator–telemanipulator–environment system. The experimental results show clearly that the proposed passivity conditions ensure stability and transparency performances against variable time-delays and scaling factors.