IMECE2003-42537 MULTIVARIABLE CONTROL DESIGN FOR A BILATERAL TELEMANIPULATOR

ABSTRACT This paper presents an architecture and control methodology for a multi-degree-of-freedom teleoperator system. The approach incorporates impedance control of the telemanipulator pair and formulates the system as a single feedback loop encompassing the human operator, telemanipulator, and remote environment. In so doing, multivariable Nyquist-like techniques are used to design compensation for enhanced stability robustness and performance. A measure of the transparency exhibited by the multivariable teleoperator system is attained using matrix singular values. The approach is experimentally demonstrated on a three degree-of-freedom scaled telemanipulator pair with a highly coupled environment. Using direct measurement of the power delivered to the operator to assess the system's stability robustness, along with the proposed measure of multivariable transparency, the loopshaping compensation is shown to improve the stability robustness by a factor of almost two and the transparency by more than a factor of five