On position tracking in bilateral teleoperation

This paper addresses the problem of position tracking in bilateral teleoperation. Passivity based control schemes for bilateral teleoperation provide robust stability against network delays in the feedback loop and velocity tracking, but do not guarantee position tracking in general. Position drift due to environment contact and offset of initial conditions is a well known problem in such systems. In this paper, we introduce a new architecture which builds upon the traditional passivity based configuration by using additional position control on both the master and slave robots. Lyapunov stability methods are used to establish the range of the position control gains on the master and slave side. Simulation results using a single-degree of freedom master/slave system are presented showing the performance of the resulting system.