A teleoperator is a pair of robot manipulators connected in such a way as to allow operating the slave on a remote environment through the master. The most important issue for designing a teleoperator is to make the operator feel as if he/she directly interacts with the remote environment. To achieve this, there are several key technologies have to be solved. One of the important technologies that play an integral role is control. Even though there have been numerous researches, the study of increasing control performance while guaranteeing system stability in spite of highly variable human operator and environment dynamics is still an open problem.
In this dissertation, a novel energy-based method is proposed to ensure stable teleoperation under a wide variety of operating conditions with increase of conservatism even less. This control method is developed in a general framework since the issue that increasing the performance while guaranteeing stability with wide range of uncertainty sets, is not only confined to the control of teleoperator. This has been a common theoretical issue in control theories. In terms of energy flow, large classes of control systems are expressed from a network point of view. The condition for guaranteeing the stability of the presented network model is obtained based on the concept of passivity. For satisfying the obtained stability condition, a new control scheme that is based on the time-domain definition of passivity is proposed. We define a "Passivity Observer" (PO) which measures energy flow in and out of one or more subsystems in real-time software. Active behavior is indicated by a negative value of the PO at any time. We also define the "Passivity Controller" (PC), an adaptive dissipative element which, at each time sample, absorbs exactly the net energy output (if any) measured by the PO. The most powerful point of the PO/PC method is that it requires very little additional computation and does not re...