An Approach to Architecture Design of Bilateral Control System based on a Layer Structure

Abstract

A bilateral control system aims at realizing a fine haptic transmission between a human operator and a remote environment object. Such a system is expected to realize multiple requirements in practical applications, and the architecture design based on a layer structure has to be considered. This paper treats a surgery robot system as an example, and its system has two requirements: “large workspace” and “fine haptic sensation”. Using the conventional bilateral control system to realize these requirements simultaneously is difficult because mechanical and control designs are separately discussed. At the same time, a system that has multiple requirements such as a fine/coarse system is often designed only using position information. This study proposed to consider not only mechanical/control design but also the position/force information simultaneously from the perspective of an architecture design. The proposed architecture decomposes the functions into each motor/robot by defining roles and combining each role in the layer structure. The advantage of the proposal is that a complex system can be designed as a entire by combining multiple sub-functions that can be simply designed. As a result, the surgery robot system is designed by considering its requirements, and the experiments are carried out to verify if the requirements are satisfied.