Operator Dynamics Consideration for Less Conservative Coupled Stability Condition in Bilateral Teleoperation

Bilateral teleoperation control systems are designed for guaranteed stability against uncertainties in operator and environment dynamics. In this paper, we study the effect of human operator dynamics on the coupled stability by incorporating the operator dynamics in the master-slave network. We will analytically prove and graphically show that for any potentially unstable control architecture, as the operator minimum damping grows, the teleoperation system can stably tolerate a larger range of variations in the environment impedance parameters. More importantly, we will demonstrate how the proposed coupled stability analysis method can be utilized to design stabilizing controllers for enhanced transparency, given a priori knowledge or online estimate of human operator damping.