Control Design and Experiments for Enhanced Detection of Stiffness Variation in Soft-tissue Telemanipulation

The performance index in teleoperation, transparency, is often defined as linear scaling of force and position between the master/operator and slave/environment. 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. To demonstrate the utility of such performance index, an enhanced …