Sliding impedance control for improving transparency in telesurgery

This paper describes a novel control scheme for teleoperation with constant communication time delay and soft tissue in environment of slave side. This control scheme combine fidelity criteria with sliding impedance. Fidelity is a measure for evaluating telesurgical system when environment at slave side contains soft tissues. Sliding impedance is used to stabilize the teleoperating system with constant time delays and improve tracking performance in the presence of uncertainties in slave dynamics. The control system contains impedance and sliding impedance control in master and slave manipulators, respectively. Parameters of sliding impedance controller are obtained from fidelity optimization problem while parameters of master impedance controller are determined such that to guarantee stability of the entire teleopertaion system. Simulation results demonstrate suitable performance of position and force tracking of the telesurgical system.