Impedance Shaping based on Bilateral Control in Teleoperation System

Nowadays, teleoperation is utilized in many areas such as medical care and space exploration. Teleoperation system enables an operator to undertake precise work in such inaccessible or hazardous environment. In bilateral teleoperation, the transmission of force sensation is important. In other words, the impedance transmitted to an operator should be equal to environmental impedance. That is the goal of bilateral teleoperation and defined as transparency. Also, it is possible to alter force sensation by using bilateral control. This idea is valuable when the characteristics of task impedance are different from those of human world, such as micro world. In case of tele-manipulating the objects which are in the place where the characteristics are different from those in human world, work performance would be improved if an operator can manipulate the objects as they are in human world. In this paper, we propose the impedance shaping based on bilateral control. The validity and stability of the proposed control system is demonstrated theoretically and experimentally.