Design of Bilateral Teleoperators for Soft Environments with Adaptive Environmental Impedance Estimation

This paper studies the problem of improving the fidelity of bilateral teleoperators under the stability constraint. First, a new fidelity measure for teleoperators is proposed. Then the teleoperator design problem is formulated as the optimization problem of maximizing the proposed fidelity measure under the stability constraint. The robust stability theory for unstructured uncertainty is applied to analyze the stability of bilateral teleoperators. Third, a new scheme to estimate adaptively the environmental impedance is developed to improve the fidelity of the systems. Finally, a case study is presented to validate the introduced approach.