Stabilization of User-Defined Feedback Controllers in Teleoperation With Passive Coupling Reference

Ensuring stability in time-delayed teleoperation can be difficult in some cases where the feedback forces need to be modified as defined by the user, to increase transparency. In the present letter, we propose an approach to ensure stability of any feedback controller selected by the user by considering a basic passive framework as reference. Stability properties of the proposed method are discussed and we apply it on different feedback controllers as examples. We present the results of hardware experiments, with performance comparison of three different control architectures stabilized with the proposed approach, with different delays and environment stiffnesses.