A bilateral control system to synchronize with haptic and visual sense for teleoperation over network

In teleoperation, human operator manipulates a master robot while watching a video image which is sent from remote environment. If ideal bilateral control is realized in teleoperation, human operator can sense impedance of environment. This information will prevent from breaking remote environment and human operator can achieve more dexterous tasks. However, the presence of network delays between a master robot and a slave robot makes the design of this system challengeable. One of the concerns is the synchronization with haptic and visual sense. This paper proposes a bilateral control system to synchronize haptic and visual sense. For realizing this control target, the round trip time delayed master force is utilized. In the proposed control system, the position response of the master robot synchronizes with the visual image of the slave robot. The validity is confirmed by numerical analysis and experimental results.