The thesis focuses on control of bilateral master-slave teleoperators. In the thesis, the bilateral control issue of teleoperators is studied, investigated and a new scheme that overcomes basic unsolved problems is proposed. A performance measure, based on the multi-port modelling method, is introduced in order to evaluate and understand the limitations of earlier published bilateral control laws. Based on the study evaluating the different methods, the objective of the thesis is stated. The proposed control law is then introduced in the thesis, its ideal performance is demonstrated, and conditions for stability and robustness are derived. It is shown that stability, desired performance and robustness can be obtained under the assumption that the deviation of the model from the actual system satisfies certain norm inequalities and the measurement uncertainties are bounded.

The proposed scheme is validated by numerical simulation. The simulated system is based on the configuration of the RAL (Robotics and Automation Laboratory) telerobot, which was designed and built in our laboratory. From the simulation results it is shown that good tracking performance can be obtained.

In order to verify the performance of the proposed scheme when applied to a real hardware system, an experimental setup of a 3 degree of freedom master-slave teleoperator (i.e. 3 degree of freedom master and 3 degree of freedom slave robot) was built in our laboratory. Three basic experiments are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed control scheme. The first experiment verifies the master control law, and its contribution to the robustness and good performance of the entire system. The second experiment demonstrates the actual performance of the system while performing a free motion teleoperadng task. The third experiment is similar to the second experiment, but a contact teleoperating task is performed. From the experimental results, it is shown that the control law has good performance and is robust to uncertainties in the models of the master and slave.