A Bilateral Controller Design Method for Master-Slave Robots with Different DOF

In this paper, a bilateral controller for master-slave robots with different DOF (degrees of freedom) is designed based on concept of multilateral control. A multilateral control system is a kind of bilateral control systems, and it is composed of multi-master and multi-slave robots, e.g. two master robots and three slave robots. It is shown that multilateral control, including bilateral control, is realized by using mode transformation by DFT (discrete Fourier transform). In addition, decoupling of each mode and transparency for multilateral control are discussed. Moreover, multilateral control is applied to a bilateral grasping control system. In this system, a human operator manipulates two master robots, and three slave robots grasp an object cooperatively. The proposed system makes it possible to grasp an object tightly in the slave side and to transmit feeling of grasping to a human operator vividly. The validity of the proposed method is shown by the experimental results.