A method for passivity analysis of multilateral haptic systems

This paper presents a novel criterion to study the stability of multilateral teleoperation systems based on passivity. Such systems (modeled as n-port networks) have recently found interesting applications in cooperative haptic teleoperation and haptic-assisted training. The criterion provides researchers with an analytical, closed-form, necessary, and sufficient condition useful for both analysis and design of multilateral haptic teleoperation systems. The paper shows that when n = 2 the proposed conditions reduce to the well-known Raisbeck's passivity criterion for 2-port networks. The proposed conditions are used to study the passivity (and consequently the stability) of a dual-user haptic system for control of a single teleoperated robot. Simulations and experiments are performed to further test the validity of the proposed criterion.