Haptic information sharing by multilateral control

In recent years, bilateral system has been widely researched for its functionality and availability. The system is effective in the fields of medical treatment, but application is limited to one-on-one system. The purpose of this study is development of basic technology for haptic information sharing technology. In this paper, a noble bilateral control method is introduced to realize multiple inputs or plural outputs bilateral system. At first, bilateral system based on acceleration control is discussed. Acceleration control is accomplished by disturbance observer. Both of master and slave are controlled by position regulator and force servoing, and these two controllers are decomposed into two modes in the virtual space. Decomposed controller helps to control position and force information individually. Second, the bilateral control is extended and generalized as a multilateral control which based on the decomposed controller. In the proposed multilateral control, interactivity and synchronism are achieved easier than conventional control. Third, numerical simulation and experimental results are shown. Proposed method is easy to expand to infinite dimension. As a minimum dimension of the multilateral control, the series of experiments are conducted by six robots. The numerical simulation and experimental results show the viability of the proposed method.