Bilateral Control System Using Nonlinear Flexible Slave Arm with Network Delay

This research focuses on stability analysis of a bilateral control system using a nonlinear single-link flexible slave arm with constant communication network delay. In our study, a rigid master arm and a single-link flexible slave arm comprise a bilateral control system where control is performed over a communication network with constant delay. A flexible arm was modeled by a linearized system in our previous research; however, it is described by a nonlinear system in this paper. The stability of the proposed bilateral control system is analyzed by using the Lyapunov stability theorem. The reaction torque for the rigid master arm and the control torque for the flexible slave arm are generated by a proportional-derivative (PD) controller and a proportional-derivativestrain (PDS) controller, respectively. These controllers are derived from the candidate Lyapunov function, which is defined as the total energy. Several numerical simulations demonstrate the high performance of our bilateral control system.