Abstract This paper addresses issues of performance versus stability robustness tradeoffs in bilateral teleoperation controller design. Two approaches are presented. The first approach uses standard H∞-optimization and weight adjustment to explore controller design assuming that the hand and environment impedances are known and fixed. The second approach uses the Youla-Bongiorno “Q” parametrization of controllers. Transparency and robustness measures are defined as functional, while controllers are obtained as solutions to convex optimization problems. Stability for one or several fixed hand impedances and all passive slave environments can be guaranteed by defining a convex passivity constraint. The controller design and trade-offs for a motion-scaling teleoperation system designed for use in microsurgery experiments are presented. The effect of weight adjustment in the H∞-optimization framework and tradeoffs curves between measures of transparency and robustness obtained by convex optimization are displayed.
Salcudean et al. (Sun,) studied this question.