Adaptive robust control for bilateral teleoperators in soft environments

Previous research on teleoperators concentrates on the interaction between teleoperators and very stiff environments. For applications such as telesurgery, the remote environment is soft such that the stability constraint becomes less critical. At the same time, the performance or fidelity for bilateral teleoperators becomes a significant issue. This paper studies how to achieve higher fidelity of force feedback in bilateral teleoperators under the stability constraint. Specifically, a new fidelity measure for multiple DOF teleoperation systems was proposed and an adaptive robust control method was applied to improve the fidelity of the system.