Design and stability analysis of impedance controller for bilateral teleoperation under a time delay

A new impedance controller is proposed for bilateral teleoperation under a time delay. The proposed controller does not need to measure or estimate the time delay in the communication channel using the force loop-back. In designing a stable impedance controller, absolute stability is used as a stability analysis tool, which results in a less conservative controller than the passivity concept. Moreover, in order to remove the conservatism associated with the assumption of infinite port impedances, the boundaries of human and environment impedance are set to finite values. Based on this, this paper proposes a parameter design procedure for stable impedance controllers. The validity of the proposed control scheme is demonstrated by experiments with a 1-dof master/slave system.