On the Use of Two Channels for Bilateral Telemanipulation

A two-channel architecture is presented for the control of a bilateral telemanipulation system. The use of two channels enables the authors to cast the control problem in a classical unity-feedback control loop form, which in turn enables the use of frequency-domain loop shaping techniques. Specifically, the human-manipulators-environment loop can be supplemented with a compensator of a lead/lag form, which can be utilized to simultaneously increase the stability robustness and the transparency bandwidth of the system. This design approach is illustrated with a single-degree-of-freedom example.