Bilateral Control of Nonlinear Flexible Master-Slave Arms Using High-Geared Servomotor with Time-Varying Delay

This paper investigates a bilateral control system for nonlinear flexible master-slave arms (FMSA) using a high-geared servomotor with time-varying delays. The proposed bilateral control system consists of rigid master and flexible slave arms connected by a communication network and controlled by proportional derivative (PD) and proportional derivative and strain (PDS) controllers. The flexible arm is actuated by a high-geared servomotor and modeled as a nonlinear system. Both arms are connected via the communication network, which causes the time-varying delay. To control the master and slave arms, PD and PDS controllers including information on angular velocity error of both arms are designed. Since the total energy of our system is regarded as a candidate Lyapunov function, stability of the proposed system is proved via the Lyapunov theorem. Furthermore, passivity is also proved. Numerical simulations are performed to confirm performance of the proposed FMSA system.