Impedance control schemes for bilateral teleoperation

This paper first presents a review of different impedance control schemes found in the literature and discusses their applicability in bilateral teleoperation of homecare robotics. Impedance control ensures enhanced transparency by appropriately controlling the dynamic behavior between motion and applied forces in the task space of the manipulators that execute the contact tasks. Performance of the system is improved by using online estimation of stiffness in the unknown environment with which the slave manipulator is in contact. A method of admittance control is implemented in a system of bilateral teleoperation in our laboratory. The effectiveness of the admittance control and its preference over other schemes in the context of homecare robotics are validated through experimentation, and results are presented.