Virtual Coupling Design for Stability and Transparency of Multi Device Haptic Systems with Delays

This paper deals with haptic systems involving multiple human operators and devices with computational and communication delays. A method is proposed for the design of stabilizing controllers which also guarantee transparency, i.e., controllers are designed to mitigate the impact of delays and of the controllers themselves on the realism of the tactile interaction. The proposed approach exploits an extension of a previously developed passivity-based framework for stabilization combined with a special loop shaping-like technique. The design procedure involves the solution of a sequence of Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) optimization problems.