Design of feedforward and feedback position control for passive bilateral teleoperation with delays

Bilateral teleoperation systems connected to computer networks such as the internet must be able to operate with varying time delays since such systems can easily become unstable. A passivity concept has been used as the framework to solve the stability problem in the bilateral control of teleoperation systems. Passivity and tracking performance are recovered using a control architecture that incorporates time varying gains into the transmission path, feedforward, and feedback position control. The proposed architecture has an inner component that can accommodate any configuration but still remain stable and passive even with varying time delay. The simulation results for a single degree of freedom master/slave system demonstrate the performance of the proposed control architecture.