Contact transition stability analysis for a bilateral teleoperation system

A bilaterally controlled teleoperation system usually involves contact tasks at a remote location. Dynamic interaction between the slave robot and the environment may cause severe chattering instability. This paper presents a contact transition stability analysis for a position-error-based bilateral teleoperation system. The scenario studied is when the slave robot collides with a stationary stiff environment. Under a few assumptions and conditions, the teleoperation system is shown to be asymptotically stable. The analysis includes the dynamics of the human arm and of the environment.