Robust Control for Haptic-based Robotic Teleoperation

The paper deals with teleoperated robotic systems that are commanded by a human operator via interface that provides task feedback information. In order to successfully perform challenging tasks, not only visual, but also a haptic feedback is strongly desired. Thus, such teleoperator system has to be controlled bilaterally. The paper presents a bilateral control scheme which is designed based on modal decomposition to decouple force and position coordinates. The control algorithm is derived following the sliding mode control approach which guarantees robustness to model perturbation, parameters uncertainty and system disturbance. The proposed design also applies external force observer; thus, none external force sensor is required. The design was experimentally validated on a simple master-slave teleoperator with a 1-DoF robotic system.