Transparency-Optimal Passivity Layer Design for Time-Domain Control of Multi-DoF Haptic-Enabled Teleoperation

This paper presents a novel optimization-based passivity control algorithm for haptic-enabled bilateral teleoperation systems involving multiple degrees of freedom. In particular, in the context of energy-bounding control, the contribution focuses on the implementation of a passivity layer for an existing time-domain scheme, ensuring optimal transparency of the interaction along subsets of the environment space which are preponderant for the given task, while preserving the energy bounds required for passivity. The involved optimization problem is convex and amenable to real-time implementation. The effectiveness of the proposed design is validated via an experiment performed on a virtual teleoperated environment.