Bilateral control for a non-similar teleoperation system

Several teleoperation systems are composed of robot manipulators with the same open kinematic model. This is a benefit because either the control design and the trajectory planning can be carried out in joint space coordinates. On the other hand, parallel manipulators have certain advantages over serial ones, for instance they have low moving inertia, high force ratio and high accuracy, making them suitable in several teloperation tasks. This work presents the control issues of a non similar teleoperation scheme composed by a serial manipulator at the master side and a parallel robot at the slave side. The different kinematic configuration and the strong nonlinearities in the slave robot dynamic model makes difficult the controller design. In this article we explore such difficulties and present a bilateral teleoperation output feedback control algorithm which does not require the dynamic model of the manipulators. Experimental results are presented to show the performance of the proposed control scheme.