Experimental Evaluation of Two Bilateral Control Schemes Applied to a Tele-Operated Hydraulic Actuator

Providing force feedback along with other sensory information can greatly increase task quality, productivity, and safety during teleoperation of hydraulic manipulators. However, as compared to the class of electrically-actuated robots, research on application of bilateral control schemes applied to the class of hydraulic manipulators is sparse. In this paper, we present experimental results of implementing two bilateral control scheme, previously developed for electrically-actuated manipulators, to a hydraulic actuator having additional nonlinear dynamics. The two schemes chosen are ‘force reflection’ and ‘position error’. The performance of each scheme is evaluated in terms of position tracking, force tracking, and fidelity of perceived stiffness by the human operator. The results reveal specific features of each scheme paving the road for future research in this direction in terms of designing appropriate bilateral control schemes for hydraulic manipulators.