Stable Non-linear Force/Position Mapping for Enhanced Telemanipulation of Soft Environments

The performance index in bilateral teleoperation, transparency, is often defined as linear scaling between the master and slave positions, as well as the operator and environment forces. Motivated by applications involving soft tissue manipulation such as robotic surgery, the transparency objective is generalized to include monotonic nonlinear mappings between the master/slave position and force signals. Modified Lyapunov-based adaptive …