An Extended State Convergence Architecture for Multilateral Teleoperation Systems

State convergence is a novel scheme to control a teleoperation system in a bilateral mode. Starting from modeling an n
^th
order teleoperation system on state space, the scheme offers a simple and elegant procedure, which requires 3n+1 design conditions to be solved in order to synchronize the master and slave systems, and to achieve the desired dynamic behavior of the teleoperation system. However, in its current form, the scheme cannot be applied in situations where more than one master and/or slave systems are involved to perform a certain task. To overcome this limitation, we first present an alpha-modified version of the standard state convergence architecture for a single-master/single-slave teleoperation system. This alpha-modified architecture is then used to develop extended state convergence architecture for a multi-master/multi-slave teleoperation system. The resulting extended state convergence architecture requires solving a set of n(k+l)+(n+1)kl design equations to determine the control gains for synchronizing k-master and l-slave systems in a desired dynamic way. MATLAB simulations considering a one-degree-of-freedom dual-master/tri-slave teleoperation system are presented to show the efficacy of the proposed extended state convergence architecture for multilateral teleoperation systems.