Bilateral Control With Continuously Variable Scaling

This paper proposes a method for the scaled bilateral teleoperation with continuously variable position and force scaling. In the proposed method, the controller is reformulated to synchronize the forces and velocities which provides the operator with the ability to change the scaling gains during operation. For the derivation of the controller, exponentially decaying error dynamics are preferred over the assumption of disturbance compensation with Disturbance Observers (DOB). Following the mathematical derivation, the algorithm is tested on a setup containing single DOF master and slave robots with the ability of giving force feedback to the operator. In order to provide a complete analysis, several different sets of experiments are made with sinusoidal velocity and force scales having different amplitudes and frequencies. Experiment results illustrate the successful tracking responses and stable operation of the proposed control scheme for the continuously varying velocity and force scales.