Small gain design of cooperative teleoperator system with projection-based force reflection

Developments to the small-gain design approach to networked cooperative force-reflecting teleoperators are presented. Explicit assumptions on the human dynamics are incorporated into the stability analysis, and the conservatism of the small-gain design is eliminated using the projection-based force reflection principle. Results are established that describe the stability properties of the networked cooperative teleoperator system under different conditions on the human dynamics and for different types of the force reflection algorithms. Samples of experimental results are presented.