Port-Hamiltonian based bilateral telemanipulation

Telemanipulation is one of the first fields of application of robotics (see [326] for an early history) and still one of the most challenging. In teleoperation a human operator has to perform a certain task on a remote environment. The human operator commands a local robotic interface (called master). The motion of the master is transmitted through a communication channel to a remote robot (called slave) which should replicate the motion of the master and perform a desired task on the remote environment. It is possible to improve performances providing to the human operator some real-time information about the interaction of the slave with the remote environment. This feedback information can be achieved in several ways (e.g. through visual displays, [146]) but the best way to improve the operator's ability is to feedback the contact force between the slave and the environment to the master side. When the force at the slave side is reflected back to the human operator, it is said that the telemanipulation is controlled bilaterally, or, more simply, that we have a bilateral telemanipulation system. When teleoperation is performed over a great distance, such as in undersea or in space applications, or over packet switching network, such as the Internet, the communication delay associated to the transmission of information from master side to slave side and vice-versa becomes non negligible and it can therefore destabilize the whole system. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.