Figure 1: Basic Bilateral Teleoperation Scheme.
namic scaling parameters. It seems DSTS is preferred
to carry out over dissimilar teleoperation systems, as
it was observed heuristically in several experiments
(Cho and Park, 2002).
On one hand, telepresence depends of the degree
of transparency, which can be understood as the si-
multaneous convergence of the position and force er-
ror between the master and slave robot. However it
also depends on the subjective cognition of the hu-
man operator of being there, which depends, among
other aspects, on visual aids of the remote environ-
ment, kinesthetic coupling, the ability to deal with
delayed signals and the man-machine interface. How
does these factors are related in DSTS to guarantee
stable teleoperation?
In this paper, motivated by the empirical observa-
tion that a DSTS is easier to handle, it is argued that
dynamic and kinematic similarity introduce a clear
trade-off of some of these aspects, so it is reason-
able to expect a simpler a trade-off. Analytical re-
sults are found based on an impedance control scheme
(Garcia-Valdovinos, 2006), when the delay is consid-
ered constant but unknown.
1.1 Motivation
When the master and slave teleoperated robots are re-
lated linearly by scaling factors of position and force,
as well as scaling factors on dynamic and kinematic
parameters, a relationship between geometry, power
and perception arise to give to the operator a linear
relationship behavior. Such scaling factors might give
to humans the ability to increase their commanding,
perceptual and cognitive skills in different teleopera-
tion tasks, depending on the task undergoing. It has
been observed experimentally that by tuning prop-
erly these scaling factors a human operator improves
his ability to better teleoperate such system (Cho and
Park, 2002). Can DSTS yield teleoperation tasks with
greater dexterity? What are the trade-offs? It is of in-
terest to understand deeper this phenomena using for-
mal dynamical system tools to analyze properties of
stability of dynamically similar teleoperation system.
1.2 Contribution and Organization
Our basic hypothesis is that as long as the human per-
ceives linear correlated variations in both teleoperated
robots, he can improve the command of the closed-
loop bilateral teleoperation system since spatial and
temporal attributes of the visual remote location and
kinesthetic coupling will vary linearly without distor-
tion. So cognitively, the human can quickly learn to
command the task with greater dexterity. Addition-
ally in this paper we deal with unknown time delay
so we design a novel controller to deal with unknown
constant time delay (Garcia-Valdovinos, 2006), (Cho
and Park, 2002). A computed-torquecontroller is em-
ployed in the master station and a computed torque
second order sliding mode controller in the slave sta-
tion is proposed to produce a desired impedance in
closed loop. Then, absolute stability theory and pas-
sivity is used to analyze the closed-loop stability prop-
erties and therefore the limits of human-teleoperation
stability and thus we found the stability trade-offs. To
this end, a review is presented in Section 2. Then, in
Section 3 the dynamically similar coupled system is
presented, while controllers are explained in Section
4. With this result at hand, absolute stability using
Llewelyn criteria (Llewellyn, 1952), and passivity us-
ing Raisbeck criteria (Raisbeck, 1994), are analyzed
in Sections 5 and 6 respectively. The Llewellyn’s
analysis reveals that a good choice for dynamic scal-
ing factors give us the opportunity for greater bounds
on position and force scaling to execute tasks of high
performance. A quality criterium for transparency
analysis is also presented in Section 7. Simulations
on a 1 DoF teleoperation systems are shown to illus-
trate how this dynamic scaling factor improve the per-
formance of the system, shown in Section 8 to better
understand the numerical performance. Final conclu-
sions are given in Section 9.
LIMITS OF HUMAN INTERACTION IN DYNAMICALLY SIMILAR TELEOPERATION SYSTEMS - Under
Unknown Constant Time Delay with Impedance Control
103