Bilateral control of nonlinear flexible master-slave arm with time delay

This paper presents stability analysis of bilateral control for nonlinear single-link flexible master-slave arms with constant time delay. The considered system consists of a rigid master-arm and a single-link flexible slave-arm which are connected over the communication network with constant time delay. In our previous work, the flexible arm is modeled as a linear system. In this paper, the mathematical model of the flexible arm is described by a nonlinear dynamics. The PDS (proportional, derivative and strain feedback) based control law for our nonlinear flexible master-slave arm is employed. The stability of the proposed system is shown via the Lyapunov stability theorem. The performance of our bilateral control is demonstrated by several numerical results.