Bilateral Control of Master-Slave Manipulators for Ideal Kinesthetic Coupling

The way to control master-slave manipulators affects considerably to the maneuverability of the master-slave systems. The ideal state of master-slave systems can be regarded that the operator can operate the system as if he were directly manipulating the object which is actually existing at the remote site. In other saying, the system must be coupled with the operator to give the ideal kinesthetic sense so that he can perceive the object. So far, several researches discussed about the ideal states of master-slave systems in their own descriptions. However, there is few exact discussion about how close the ideal state can be achieved actually or what kind of control scheme should be designed in order to achieve it. In this paper, we propose a control scheme which can achieve the ideal kinesthetic coupling with the operator and realize three ideal responses which were previously defined by the authors. Secondly, we show the stability of the system controlled by the proposed scheme by using the concept of passivity. We then discuss about the system stability when the sensor signals are pass through the filters. Lastly, the validity of the proposed scheme is confirmed by simulations.