Stability and Transparency in Bilateral Teleoperation of a Surgical Robot

Teleoperation plays a major role in many robotic applications such as minimally invasive surgeries, deep underwater/ space operations, hazardous manipulations etc. This necessitates the development of better controllers and architectures that are efficient for practical implementation. The systematic analysis of the developments in the field of teleoperation and the current direction of research are presented herein. This paper elaborates on the practical issues in the development of a teleoperation system, the means by which researchers have attempted to solve these, the level of success, and the future directions. The teleoperation of a surgical robot with a master-slave configuration is considered as a case study to emphasise the issues in bilateral teleoperation. Modelling of the system, the teleoperation control architecture and the stability-transparency issues are presented along with the corresponding simulation results. Finally, an architecture is suggested, which serves as a suitable platform for researchers to carryout teleoperation system analysis.