Development of a Guaranteed Stable Network of Telerobots with Kinesthetic Consensus

A framework for the development of a stability-guaranteed telerobotic system with an arbitrary number of masters and slaves is considered in this work. The method starts from a single-master/single-slave force-velocity control architecture, where the lumped two-port master-slave network is split into a distributed system of two multi-port master and slave networks. Additional masters and slaves can be introduced by adding similar multi-port networks that are connected to a simple sharing protocol that exchanges kinesthetic feedback among them. Modular stability analysis of each master or slave network, regardless of the underlying sharing paradigm, is conducted using the notion of absolute k-stability (AKS). The entire system network is stable if each master and slave multi-port network is AKS. Position correspondence can be obtained by adding a novel auxiliary coordinating controller that preserves the AKS of the master and slave networks. The stability and kinesthetic performance of the proposed control system are analyzed numerically and experimentally for a dual-master/single-slave telerobotic system.