Improving transparency of bilateral control system by sliding mode assist disturbance observer

Transparency is an important indicator to evaluate the performance of a bilateral control system. Uncompensated disturbances in high frequency degrade the transparency in the traditional disturbance observer (DOB) based bilateral control. This paper analyzes the influence of the uncompensated disturbances, and proposes a sliding mode assist disturbance observer (SMADO) to solve the problem. The sliding mode technique helps the original DOB to estimate the disturbances in high frequency by making use of a rapid switching control value. The required switching gain is small in the proposal, which is good for alleviating the chattering. Moreover, to avoid conservative and arbitrary design of the switching gain, a reasonable benchmark is proposed by employing the estimation error between the original DOB and another parallel DOB with a different cutoff frequency. The validity of the proposal is confirmed by experiments.