Contact motion stabilization using equivalent future response in synchronized bilateral teleoperation

This paper proposes a method to stabilize contact motion to hard environment without enlarging additional operational force in synchronized bilateral teleoperation. It is well known that tactile transmission ability of bilateral teleoperation becomes worse because of a time delay between the systems. In this background, synchronized bilateral teleoperation (SBT) was previously proposed that highly performs to reproduce an impedance of an environment in a master system. On the other hand, the control system requires large operational force in order to realize stable contact motion, especially to high stiffness environment. In this paper, the trade-off is overcome by using the equivalent plant model of the control system. The plant model realizes to calculate the future value of the system's position and velocity responses. Compensation value for stable contact motion is only generated when the system starts to contact with the environment. The validity of the proposed method is confirmed through experiments.