Power-based damping injection for bilateral control systems under time delay

This paper proposes a novel method to improve the stability of time-delayed bilateral control systems. 3-channel bilateral control system is one of teleoperation systems with haptic feedback. It can transmit haptic sense without large operational force even under time delay. However, the stability of contact motion with hard environments is not ensured. Therefore, this paper proposes a new damping injection method based on power of mechanical systems. In this method, instantaneous power of master robot is observed every time and damping injection is performed only when the system becomes unstable. Then, proposed method can improve the stability of contact motion with keeping small operational force. Compared with conventional methods, it realizes nearly perfect operationality in free motion and the implementation is easy. The validity of the proposed method is verified by some experiments.