Reproducibility and operationality in bilateral teleoperation

There are many works about bilateral teleoperation. However, good touch sense of remote object has not been realized in actual system yet. In this paper, the goals of bilateral teleoperation are considered as following two points. One is a reproduction of environmental impedance in master side. The other is a realization of small operational force. Operational force means the force the operator feels in addition to real environmental force. Corresponding to these goals, novel evaluation indices are defined which are named "reproducibility" and "operationality", respectively. Moreover, control stability must be satisfied. After all, bilateral teleoperation must satisfy three conditions such as reproducibility, operationality and stability. Using defined evaluation indices, bilateral controller is designed. Through analysis, it is confirmed that the three desired conditions in bilateral teleoperation are well satisfied with this controller. The effectiveness of this research is demonstrated by an experiment with bilateral forceps robot.