A modular passivity framework for multilateral teleoperation applications

In the past few years multilateral teleoperation systems that enable the interaction and coupling of several robotic devices gained in importance as this concept promises especially an increase of ergonomics and precision in teleoperation systems. The challenge in the control of such multi-robot setups is the generalization of the stability proof independent of the number of robotic agents involved. Particularly in the presence of time delay in the communication channel the use of passivity control methods are widely used in bilateral as well as multilateral systems. In literature it was shown that the passivity concept also provides a modular framework that allows for the generalization of stability proofs rendering a frequencybased analysis unnecessary. This paper provides an overview on the existing framework modules and their application to different bilateral communication architectures.