Mechatronic Design Optimization of a Teleoperation System Based on Bounded Environment Passivity

This paper presents a mechatronic analysis of a teleoperation system that provides haptic feedback. The analysis, based on the Bounded Environment Passivity method, describes the combined effect of the teleoperation controller and the master and slave hardware, including the effect of structural flexibilities, which have often been neglected in the domain of teleoperation. This results in rules of thumb for the design of the hardware and the tuning of the controller. As two of these rules of thumb pose a trade-off in hardware design, an unprecedented conceptual design optimization is described in a second part of this paper. The objective is to demonstrate the need for a mechatronic approach to the design of teleoperation systems in order to obtain maximal system performance.