A New Proportional Controller for Nonlinear Bilateral Teleoperators

One of the major breakthroughs in the problem of control of bilateral teleoperators with guaranteed stability properties has been the use of scattering signals to transform the transmission delays into a passive transmission line. Under the reasonable assumption that the human operator and the contact environment define passive (force to velocity) maps, stability of the overall system is then ensured. This robust and physically appealing scheme, first proposed by Anderson and Spong, has ever since dominated the field. In this paper we propose two novel teleoperation schemes, based on a simple P-Like controller. These schemes do not make use of the scattering or wave variables. Moreover, under the classical assumption of passivity of the terminal operators plus a gravity compensation term, we can ensure position coordination of the master and the slave.