Bilateral Control by Transmitting Force Information with Application to Time-delay Systems and Human Motion Reproduction

The decreasing number of workers and the loss of techniques of skilled workers, associated with an aging society, which can be attributed to the falling birth rate, are serious issues. To solve these problems, human substitution by the robot technology is essential. This study proposes a bilateral control system that only transmits the force information and presents applications to scaled bilateral control, time-delay systems, and human motion preservation and reproduction. The reported study demonstrated that the structure and performance of the proposed bilateral control system are equivalent to those of the conventional four-channel bilateral control using the position/force information. In the proposed method, because the position information is not used, the amount of transmitted or stored data is reduced compared to that in the conventional four-channel bilateral control and motion reproduction using position/force information. Simulations and experiments were conducted to evaluate the proposed method.