Contents I. Introduction
The difficulty in implementing a teleoperation system comes from the unpredictability of human and environment impedances, communication disturbances (i.e., time delay), and quantization error. Previous works in the literature focus on the design of robust controllers to overcome such uncertainties and disturbances from a control point of view. The controllers are designed for a specific master device, slave manipulator, and task. Thus, the teleoperation system with a well-tuned controller can perform the best. This approach is applicable when it is possible for the designer to freely select mechanisms and sensors for the master device and the slave manipulator. However, in most applications, there are constraints in designing mechanisms and choosing sensors, including financial cost. For example, in robotic telesurgical systems for minimally invasive surgery, the size of actuators and the number of sensors are restricted since the slave manipulator works inside the patient through a small port. In such a situation, one has to carefully design drive mechanisms, and distribute the limited number of sensors. In other words, the best architecture implementing a teleoperation system subject to the restrictions of the task should be designed. However, a systematic quantitative methodology comparing different architectures and evaluating design criteria such as dynamic characteristics and sensory configurations is not yet available to guide overall design of teleoperation systems. This paper presents a quantitative comparison (QC) framework for bilateral teleoperation systems (BTSs) that have different dynamic characteristics and sensory configurations for a given task-dependent performance objective (TDPO), in order to provide a framework for the design of BTSs.
