Bondgraph based approach to passive teleoperation of a hydraulic backhoe

Human operated, hydraulic actuated machines are widely used in many high-power applications. Improving productivity, safety and task quality (eg. force feedback to the operator in a teleoperated scenario) has been the focus of past research. In addressing these issues, our research proposes and experimentally demonstrates a control technique that renders a hydraulic machine (teleoperated backhoe in this case) as a two-port, coordinated, passive machine. The passive teleoperated backhoe is driven by a human operator at one-port and interacts with the environment at the other. It guarantees interaction stability and safety with the human / work environment as the latter are usually passive. In previous work, a passive teleoperation algorithm was proposed for multi degree of freedom teleoperation of a hydraulic backhoe approximated by its kinematic behavior. The approximation led to severe performance deterioration under certain operating conditions. In this paper, a bondgraph based passive teleoperation architecture is proposed for the non-linear dynamic modeled backhoe. Passive control is designed in two stages. In the first stage, bondgraph based system inversion ideas are used to determine a coordination control law. In the second stage, a desired locked system (desired dynamics of the coordinated teleoperator) is defined and an appropriate control law is determined to ensure the passivity property of the locked teleoperator. The proposed passive control law is experimentally verified for its bilateral energy transfer ability and performance enhancements.