Transparency Trade-Offs for a 3-Channel Controller Revealed by the Bounded Environment Passivity Method

In this paper, the Bounded Environment Passivity method is applied to a 3-channel controller. This method enables the design of teleoperation controllers that show passive behaviour for interactions with a bounded range of environments.The resulting tuning guidelines, derived analytically, provide interesting tuning flexibility, which allows to focus on different aspects of transparency. As telesurgery is the motivation behind this work, the focus lies on correctly reflecting the stiffness properties of the environment. A comparison between the transparency and stability properties of this 3-channel controller and the same properties of the Position-Force controller demonstrates the interesting properties o fthe 3-channel controller. The theoretical results are verified experimentally on a 1 d.o.f. master-slave setup.