Operationality of multilateral control system under constant communication time delay

This paper proposes a novel control system to improve the operationality of a multilateral control system under constant communication time delay. A multilateral control system can be used to transmit haptic sense to remote places. Operationality indicates the magnitude of the operational force, which refers to the force that the operator of a robot experiences other than the reaction force from the environment. If the operational force is large, the operator of a robot feels heavy operational feeling. Time delay is one of the factors of heavy operational feeling. In this study, we investigate the relationship between the operationality of robots and the mutual transmission of their position signals in a multilateral control system under constant communication time delay. In the proposed control system, there is no transimission of position signals between the master robots. We verify the validity of the proposed control system by performing experiments.