Robustly Stabilizing Controller Synthesis for Haptic Devices With Maximized Transparency

Performance of a haptic device is evaluated based on the concept of transparency which indicates the match between the impedance transmitted to the user and the target virtual impedance. Stability of a haptic device prevalently has been evaluated based on the passivity criterion. Due to conservativeness of passivity, it appears as an obstacle to improve transparency. In this paper, passivity is suggested to be replaced by the complementary stability criterion which accounts for the robust stability of the interaction in the presence of uncertain user hand dynamics. In this respect, an algorithm is proposed which guarantees transparency of the haptic device in a stable manner. Assuming that the dynamics of the device is known, a certain structure of compensators is assigned. This special structure guarantees transparency of the device by compensating for the dynamics of the device and its control loop. The design objective is to obtain a stabilizing controller which achieves robust stability for the interaction of the device in the presence of parametric uncertainties of user hand dynamics and other sources of uncertainties. An iterative method is implemented to derive controller dynamics. The algorithm is applied to a series elastic actuator based haptic device model. Simulation results confirm enhanced transparency and robust stability.