On the stabilization of cooperative bilateral teleoperation systems with time delays

Stabilization of delayed bilateral teleoperation systems with two master devices is considered. It is shown that allowing communication between the master devices may greatly facilitate the solution rendering the problem quadratically invariant. A convenient structure possessed by stabilizing controllers is revealed, which can be considered as an alternative to passivity-based structures. It is shown that any stabilizing controller can be implemented to comply with this structure, which, in turn, guarantees delay-independent stability of the overall system. The behavior of stabilizing controllers having the proposed structure is illustrated by simulations.