An Approach to Architecture Design of Bilateral Control System based on a Layer Structure

A bilateral control system aims at realizing a fine haptic transmission between a human operator and a remote environment object. Such a system is expected to realize multiple requirements in practical applications, and the architecture design based on a layer structure has to be considered. This paper treats a surgery robot system as an example, and its system has two requirements: "large workspace"and "fine haptic sensation". Using the conventional bilateral control system to realize these requirements simultaneously is difficult because mechanical and control designs are separately discussed. At the same time, a system that has multiple requirements such as a fine/coarse system is often designed only using position information. This study proposed to consider not only mechanical/control design but also the position/force information simultaneously from the perspective of an architecture design. The proposed architecture decomposes the functions into each motor/robot by defining roles and combining each role in the layer structure. The advantage of the proposal is that a complex system can be designed as a entire by combining multiple sub-functions that can be simply designed. As a result, the surgery robot system is designed by considering its requirements, and the experiments are carried out to verify if the requirements are satisfied. Â