A transparent bilateral control scheme for a local teleoperation system using proportional-delayed controllers

This paper addresses the closed-loop stability analysis problem of a bilateral local teleoperation system in the presence of delays, with the purpose of maintaining a kinematic correspondence between a master and a slave device. The stability analysis is proposed as a general analysis in the controller's parameter-space under the assumption of two fixed delays, considering one due to the signal and communication processing and one defined as a design delay for the controller. Furthermore, a method for measuring the fragility of the controllers is also proposed. Finally, experimental results obtained from an experimental platform consisting of two Phantom Omni haptic devices and the Matlab-Simulink toolkit Phansim illustrate the performance of the proposed approach and the video of the experiments can be downloaded from the authors' dedicated website1.