A novel control framework for nonlinear time-delayed dual-master/single-slave teleoperation

A novel trilateral control architecture for the Dual-master/Single-slave teleoperation is proposed in this paper. This framework has been used in surgical training and rehabilitation applications. In this structure, the slave motion has been controlled by weighted summation of signals transmitted by the operator referring to task control authority through the dominance factors. The nonlinear dynamics for telemanipulators are considered which were considered as disregarded issues in previous studies of this field. Bounded variable time-delay has been considered which affects the transmitted signals in the communication channels. Two types of controllers have been offered and an appropriate stability analysis for each controller has been demonstrated. The first controller includes Proportional with dissipative gains (P+d). The second one contains Proportional and Derivative with dissipative gains (PD+d). In both cases, the stability of the trilateral control framework is preserved by choosing appropriate controller's gains. It is shown that these controllers attempt to coordinate the positions of telemanipulators in the free motion condition. The stability of the Dual-master/Single-slave teleoperation has been proved by an appropriate Lyapunov like function and the stability conditions have been studied. In addition the proposed PD+d control architecture is modified for trilateral teleoperation with internet communication between telemanipulators that caused such communication complications as packet loss, data duplication and swapping. A number of experiments have been conducted with various levels of dominance factor to validate the effectiveness of the new control architecture.