Adaptive Control Strategy for a Bilateral Tele-Surgery System Interacting with Active Soft Tissues

In this paper, the problem of control and stabilization of a bilateral tele-surgery robotic system in interaction with an active soft tissue is considered. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the previous works did not consider a realistic model for a moving soft tissue like heart tissue in beating heart surgery. Here, a new model is proposed to indicate significant characteristics of a moving soft tissue, rolling as the teleoperation system environment. The model is formed by a parallel combination of a viscoelastic passive part and an active part. Furthermore, the delays in communication and parameter uncertainties of the master and slave robot dynamics are considered. Using an adaptive control strategy, the ultimate boundedness of the system trajectories while interacting with the active environment is certified, and this ultimate bound is calculated. Moreover, to evaluate the theoretical results, simulation results are presented.