Impedance control of a teleoperated pneumatic actuator: Implementation and stability Analysis

Design and implementation of a unilateral teleoperated pneumatic system is presented followed by the stability analysis. The system consists of a pneumatic actuator that is subject to an environmental force and is navigated by a human-operated hand controller. Unlike many unilateral systems, the external force is entirely handled on the slave side using an impedance control scheme which adopts a sliding mode control force controller. In contrary to bilateral teleoperation, force handling is independent to a human operator. The novelty of the work is design and implementation of a system with the benefits of unilateral teleoperation, i.e. simple design, more stability and less responsibility on the operator and also accurate force handling of bilateral systems. The concept of Lyapunov exponents is further applied to theoretically prove the stability of the entire control system. Parametric stability analysis is conducted to study the effect of changing parameters on stability. Finally, the performance of the control system is experimentally verified during force interaction between the teleoperated pneumatic actuator and