Bilateral control with a reflex mechanism on the slave side

In this work, we are presenting a sliding mode controller approach for bilateral control. The controller consists of sliding mode force and hybrid (force/position) controllers for master and slave sides, respectively. Main issues such as transparency and time delay have been addressed in the derivation and the implementation of the controller. The approach takes the overall system (unified master and slave sides) as one system and therefore uses the transparency aims of the other approaches as the means for the derivation of the controller. It also makes use of a "reflex mechanism" to protect the slave side and its environment in case of large time delays, which disables the operator to react in time. The effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is evaluated experimentally and a maximum position error of one step increment of the encoder and a maximum torque error of 3/spl times/10/sup -6/ Nm are achieved.