Intention-Aware Reverse Passivity-Based Teleoperation Stabilizer for Physical Human-(tele)Robot Interaction

In networked robotic systems, specifically haptics-enabled teleoperation, ensuring stability and trackig performance is of paramount importance. Recently, several stabilizers have leveraged the concept of 'excess of passivity' (EoP) from non-linear control theory to decode and incorporate the dissi-pative energetic behavior of human biomechanics in the design of the stabilizers. This is done to counterbalance the effect of energy accumulation in the system due to the suboptimal non-passive communication behavior (which includes delays, jitter and packet losses). However, the dissipative behavior of human biomechanics naturally degrades the perceived force transparency when considering the 'intended force' as the desired signal to be tracked. In other words, there is a 'force gap' between the tracked forces and the intended forces. This is because parts of energy production are compensated for to move human biomechanics. This paper focuses on filling the gap by designing a networked robotic architecture that recovers parts of the dissipated active force of the operator so that the remote task is conducted according to the intended action of the operator rather than dissipated action. This requires a reformulation of the telerobotic architecture and the corresponding controllers. In this paper, we mathematically formulate a reverse telerobotic design and synthesize a new passivity-based stabilizer, named Intention-aware reverse Time Domain Passivity-Based teleoperation stabilizer (ITDPB) so that system stability is guaranteed while perceived transparency is recovered. In addition, we conduct extensive grid simulations, comparing the results of our proposed stabilizer to the state-of-the-art approach. The results indicate that the proposed approach has superior performance in terms of maximizing the ratio between the force intended by the user and the actual force transmitted to the environment while guaranteeing the system's stability. The proposed stabilizer is suitable for various telerobotic applications requiring accurate intentional force, such as telerehabilitation and telesurgery.