PrefaceThis book describes a unifying framework to networked teleoperation systems cutting across multiple research fields including networked control system for linear and nonlinear forms, bilateral teleoperation, trilateral teleoperation, multilateral teleoperation, cooperative teleoperation, and some teleoperation application examples. Networked control has been deeply studied at the intersection of systems & control and robotics for a long time, and many scholarly books on the topic have been already published. Nevertheless, the approach remains active even in several new research fields, such as bilateral teleoperation, single master and multiple slaves, trilateral teleoperation, and multilateral teleoperation. Indeed, all the targeted problems of this book are rather new from a historical point of view and, to the best of our knowledge, there is no book or article covering such a broad class of problems within a unified teleoperation framework.Although networked teleoperation control and applications have attracted much research attention in the past decade, many fundamental problems are still either unexplored or less well understood. In particular, there still lacks a comprehensive framework that can cope with all the core issues in a systematic way. This motivated us to write the current monograph.The book presents theoretical explorations on several fundamental problems for several kinds of teleoperations. By integrating fresh concepts and state-of-the-art results to form a systematic approach for the motion control and identification, a fundamental theoretical framework is formed toward teleoperation systems. This book shall educate readers about the fundamental advances in the networked teleoperation research area. It is expected that the reader will require limited background knowledge to understand the various concepts and results outlined in the book. Besides elegantly unifying disparate problems, the networked teleoperation control approach also leads to practical advantages over other approaches, which will also be a benefit to readers. In the teleoperation part, readers will observe the inherent robustness of the networked controller against communication delays. Finally, a notable feature of this book is to provide not only theoretical results and techniques but also experimental case studies on a testbed of robotic systems, which is anticipated to highly motivate young students and researchers. v vi Preface careful scrutiny. We would also like to express our sincere appreciation to our co-workers who have contributed to the collaborative studies of Robotics. We are greatly indebted to our parents and families for their love, support, and sacrifice over the years. It is our pleasure to dedicate the book to them for their invisible yet invaluable contribution.