Passive bilateral feedforward control of linear dynamically similar teleoperated manipulators

This paper presents a passive bilateral feedforward control scheme for linear dynamically similar (LDS) teleoperated manipulators with kinematic scaling and power scaling. The proposed control law renders the teleoperator as a passive rigid mechanical tool with programmable apparent inertia to the human operator and the work environment by utilizing bilateral force feedforward and kinematic feedback control. The passivity of the closed-loop system is robust to force measurement inaccuracies and model uncertainty. Thus, interaction stability of the teleoperator with any passive environment is guaranteed. Coordination error and the overall motion aspects of teleoperation are controlled individually. The proposed control law is also applicable to general nonlinear robotic teleoperators if sufficiently high kinematic feedback gains are used. The proposed control schemes have been validated experimentally for both LDS and non-LDS systems.