Friction compensation for a force-feedback telerobotic system

This paper presents a model-based approach to cancel friction in the joints of the manipulators of a force-feedback telerobotic system. Friction compensation can improve the transparency of telerobotic systems, where transparency is quantified in terms of a match between the impedance of the environment and the impedance transmitted to the user. We used Dahl friction models to compensate for physical friction in the device. Experiments performed on a telerobotic system demonstrated that teleoperation transparency is improved by using these models. Further, the stability of the teleoperation is analyzed using passivity theory, and it is shown that the master-slave system remains stable up to a certain level of friction compensation