Kalman filter analysis for quantitative comparison of sensory schemes in bilateral teleoperation systems

An important area of research in the teleoperation literature is to develop systematic methods to quantitatively compare different manipulator designs in application critical tasks. Such quantitative methods are especially important during design of the manipulators to make an informed decision among various design alternatives. In this paper, a novel method to quantitatively compare different sensory schemes for a teleoperation system is introduced. This method evaluates the sensory schemes by comparing the norm of the a posteriori error covariance matrices of the Kalman filters for each configuration. The main advantage of this method is that it allows to quantitatively compare arbitrary sensory configurations.