Passive control of bilateral teleoperated manipulators

The control of a bilateral teleoperated manipulator system is considered. The goals of the control are to (i) coordinate the motions of the two manipulators according to a predefined kinematic scaling, (ii) render the dynamics of a locked system, and its response to forces from the human operator and environment to approximate that of predefined natural dynamics, (iii) to provide for possible scaling of power. In addition, for safety reasons, the closed loop system need to remain passive. For linear dynamically similar systems, dynamics of the system can be block diagonalized into two decoupled mechanical systems: the shape system that deals with the coordination error, and the locked system that describe the average motion of the two manipulators. The passive velocity field control methodology is then applied to the shape system to regulate the coordination error at 0 and at the same time preserves the passivity of the overall system.