Adaptive Controller Design of Pneumatic Teleoperation System

This paper presents an adaptive control design of a pneumatic teleoperation system that could be useful for applications like MRI-guided surgery. The system under study is special because of its reduced number of components compared to other bilateral teleoperation systems, which reduces cost and complexity. The direct fluidic connection and the force feedback that is transferred to the human operator allow the operator to feel as if s/he were having physical contact with the environment without the need for a force sensor on the slave actuator. A simulation model that allows stability and transparency assessment is presented in detail. A linear controller is optimized for various operating remote environments via transparency assessment. The linear controller leads to good results for certain operating environments, but its tuning is dependent on the impedance characteristic of the environments both on the master and slave sides. Since the system must perform under parametric uncertainties on both sides of the teleoperator, an adaptive control scheme is developed. A self-tuning regulator is designed to allow the teleoperator to cope with a variable environment. The control design is validated in simulation and yielded satisfactory performance under multiple environment settings.