Passive Pneumatic Teleoperation System

This paper describes the modeling and control of a pneumatic tele-operation scheme, where the connection of master and slave cylinder is realized signal based but also physically via long transmission lines. The system is called passive because of the passive physical connection, which can also serve as a safety fallback solution. The advantage of this scheme is that a limited force feedback is realized with a minimum of extra effort in comparison to a teleportation system without force feedback. The stiffness of the physical connection is enhanced through a cascaded position and pressure control scheme with two proportional valves as actuators for each pneumatic line. The paper presents the mathematical model of the setup, which is used to determine the relative stability of the dynamic system as a function of control parameters. An experimental setup is presented which was set up to validate the system model. For a distance of 5 m between master and slave cylinder a stiffness of 2.4 N/mm could be established.