Abstract-Recently proposed stable teleoperation control scheme, based on time domain passivity, is modified to remove several conservatisms. During unconstrained motion and contacting with soft and deformable environments, the two-port time domain passivity approach [21] was excessively dissipating energy even though it was stable without any energy dissipation. The main reason of this conservatism is on the fact that the time domain passivity controller does not include the external energy dissipation elements at the slave manipulator. The measured interaction force between slave and environment allow the time domain passivity observer to include the amount of energy dissipation of the slave manipulator to the monitored energy. With the modified passivity observer, reference energy following idea [24] is applied to satisfy the passivity condition. The feasibility of the developed methods is proved with experiments. Improved performance is obtained in unconstrained motion and contacting with a soft environment.
I. INTRODUCTIONThe goal of teleoperation system control is to achieve transparency while maintaining stability (i.e., such that the system does not exhibit vibration or divergent behavior) under any operating conditions and for any environments. In designing the bilateral controller, a classic engineering trade-off between transparency and stability has been an important issue, since transparency must often be reduced in order to guarantee stable operation in the wide range of environment impedances (for example, in terms of stiffness of "free space" and "hard contact"). This has necessitated investigating into methods to increase transparency without introducing instability. Several previous studies have sought out theoretical design methods for control parameters based on linear circuit theory However, the teleoperation systems of our interest are nonlinear and the dynamic properties of a human operator are always involved. These factors make it difficult to analyze teleoperation systems in terms of known parameters and linear control theory. To cope with the non-linearity and uncertain parameters of the teleoperation system, several researchers