Shared Compliant Control of Teleoperation Based on Stiffness Feedback

Abstract. In teleoperation tasks, communication delays between master and slave sides negatively affect the stability and transparency of closed loop system, and make it difficult to maintain a desired contact force. In order to improve the performance of contact force control in teleoperation under large time delays, a shared compliant control method is proposed in this paper. On the master side, the operator issues a desired contact force command according to the feedback of the contact stiffness identified on line besides motion commands. And on the slave side, a local contact force controller is designed using an adaptive Smith predictor, so as to shares control load with the operator. Experimental results show that this method can improve the force control performance, lower the difficulty of operation, and help the operator complete contact tasks with proper forces.