A new method for designing an optimal time-delayed teleoperator control system based on Smith's principle is presented. First, an optimal delay-free teleoperator control system is designed with the human dynamics of visual and force trackings in the control loop and with the concept of telemonitoring force feedback. Then, an optimal time-delayed teleoperator control system is obtained by applying Smith's principle to the designed delay-free teleoperator control system and by modifying system parameters to achieve robustness to modeling errors. The proposed method provides an analytic design of a closed loop control structure for conventional teleprogramming facility and of a visual and kinesthetic man-machine interface required for time-delayed teleoperation. Simulation results are shown.>

A real-time teleoperator control system designed to achieve desired performance and robustness under shared compliance control and short time delays of up to a few seconds is evaluated. In the design, telemonitoring force feedback is introduced as a new form of kinesthetic coupling; dynamic characteristics of the master and slave arms are actively modified based on generalized impedance control according to local design criteria; the human dynamics involved in generating a control command based on visual and force stimuli are incorporated into the controller design; and to balance the robustness/performance trade-off, system performance is optimized subject to a known maximum time delay. Simulation results suggest that the system is superior to conventional systems in terms of performance and robustness under short time delays and human control errors. Experimental evidence is presented to supports the advantages of the proposed telemonitoring force feedback. An experimental method for further validating the human dynamic model is described.>

The design goal of an advanced teleoperator control system is twofold: (1) to allow the operator's manual control to be robust to system nonlinearities such as time delays and operator's control errors, and (2) to support the high performance of teleoperation while reducing the operator's control burden by providing the master and slave arms with desirable dynamic properties and by allowing the slave arm to automatically perform such control tasks as compliance and force control in the form of task sharing. The authors present a novel teleoperator control system achieving the above design goal by taking the following into consideration: the human dynamics involved in generating control command based on visual and force feedback is modeled and incorporated into the controller design and evaluation: the dynamic characteristics of slave and master arms are actively modified in such a way as to implement the desirable dynamic characteristics; and the force feedback is redefined in terms of the combination of opposition and force discrepancies in order to establish the required man/machine dynamic coordination under shared control. The proposed control system with human dynamics in the control loop is simulated and compared with a number of conventional methods in the presence of human control errors and time delays.>

In this paper, we propose the concept of as a means of coordinating be- tween operator and manipulator under the shared control and the use of human in the con- trol loop to achieve a valid design of a teleoper- ator control system. Especially, this paper shows that 1) In designing and controlling teleoperation system under time delay, it is necessary to incor- porate a dynamic behavior into the con- trol loop. 2) Under the compliance and force control implemented at the remote manipulator in the form of shared control, the conventional kinesthetic coupling between man and manipula- tors based on telepresence incurs an adverse ef- fect on performance. 3) Under the communication time delay, the proposed force feedback based on telemonitoring enhances system stability as well as performance significantly. Simulation results are given.