The proper transmission of wave variables rather than power variables in teleoperation with time delays ensures system passivity – rendering the entire system stable, but the introduction of wave variables leads to distortion between the velocities/positions of the master and slave, and the performance deteriorates significantly with the increase of time delays. This paper presents a new compensating scheme implemented at the slave side to remove or cancel partially the distortion. The system passivity can still be maintained by tuning a properly designed low-pass filter. Compared with previous work, the main contribution of this work exists in two points: first, it is the actual velocity/trajectory of the slave rather than the reference velocity/trajectory of the slave that tracks the master one, so the quality of tracking is better and converges faster; second, the proposed compensator does not require any additional signal from the master side, minimizing the amount of data transmitted over the channel, which is very important from the practical point of view. The simulation and experiment results show that the velocity (or trajectory) tracking is significantly improved under the condition of stability, and the force presented to the user is close to the environment one, meaning a high degree of system transparency is achieved.

This paper describes the research activities at the Laboratory for Control Systems and Automation (LCA) which is a section of the Production Department of Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST). LCA's research activities are focused on providing fundamental technologies to cope with the current trends in manufacturing automation. The R & D activities at the laboratory cover diverse areas. The research activities at the laboratory are classified into three sections—robotics and automation, fluid servo control, and manufacturing process control. Detailed explanations are given here on robotics and its application to automation. As a laboratory belonging to a nation's leading educational institution, LCA also conducts active educational activities. Such educational programs are also introduced in detail.