Performance evaluation of three schemes applied to bilateral control of a hydraulic actuator interacting with deformable environments

In this paper, the effect of deformable environment to the performance of three bilateral teleoperation control schemes for hydraulic actuators are investigated through dynamic simulation. The considered schemes are Force Reflection, Position Error and Lyapunov feedback controllers. Two type of environments are considered, first is spring model and the second one is environment which is described by the Hertz contact model. Using a teleoperation platform, the master device is a PHANToM haptic device and the slave manipulator is a simulated hydraulic actuator. The master and slave are connected by the on-campus Intranet network setting with small and fairly constant communication delay. The stability and transparency of the overall system are evaluated according to the following criteria: (i) position tracking error of the slave manipulator; (ii) force tracking error of the master haptic device; and (iii) perceived stiffness of the environment at the master site.