Modeling and control of cooperative teleoperation systems

This paper presents a multilateral control architecture for teleoperation in multimaster/multislave environments. The proposed framework incorporates flow of position and force information between all master and slave robots, rather than merely between corresponding units. Within this architecture, cooperative performance measures are defined to enhance coordination among the operators and the robots for achieving the task objectives. A μ-synthesis-based methodology for cooperative teleoperation control is also introduced. This approach guarantees robust stability of cooperative teleoperation in the presence of dynamic interaction between slave robots, as well as unknown passive operators and environment dynamics. It also improves task coordination by optimizing relevant performance objectives. Experiments carried out with a two-master/two-slave single-axis system demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.