A Controller Design Framework for Telerobotic Systems

This paper presents a framework for designing a telerobotic system controller. This controller is designed so the dynamic behaviors of the master robot and the slave robot are functions of each other. This paper first describes these functions, which the designer chooses based upon the application, and then proposes a control architecture to achieve these functions. To guarantee that the specified functions and proposed architecture govern the system behavior, H„ control theory and model reduction techniques are used. Several experiments were conducted to verify the theoretical derivations. This control method is unique, because it does not require any transfer of either position or velocity information between the master robot and the slave robot; it only requires the transfer of forces. Although this property leads to a wider communication bandwidth between the master and slave robots, the entire system may still suffer from a positional error buildup between the master robot and slave robot.