Passive control of bilateral teleoperated manipulators: robust control and experiments

In a previous paper, a control law was developed for a passive bilateral teleoperator to achieve theoretically perfect coordination in the presence of arbitrary environment forcing, and to enable the teleoperator to behave like a passive rigid mechanical tool. In this paper, the authors develop an adaptive control law to relax the need for the precise knowledge of inertia parameters, and a robust control law to eliminate the need for expensive force sensors. In addition, a novel experiment, that mimics the dynamics of piano playing is used to evaluate the efficacies of the various controllers to provide kinesthetic coupling.