Expanding human control: A review of bilateral teleoperation methods in the robotic era

Force-feedback bilateral teleoperation—the technology that lets human operators feel and manipulate distant objects via a robot—has accelerated markedly in the past decade. In the comprehensive survey to date, Wenfeng Zheng, a professor in the school of Automation, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China and colleagues sifted through more than 1,300 journal and conference papers to chart how the field is converging on architectures and algorithms that promise “full transparency,” where remote forces are rendered so naturally that distance all but disappears.

“We grouped the literature into four canonical channel structures and seven control-algorithm families, then traced how each has nudged us closer to transparent, stable, and truly dexterous remote control,” explains one of the study's authors Jiawei Tian, Ph.D. candidate of Hanyang Unniversity.

Early master–slave links carried only position commands. Today’s four-channel schemes send both position and force bidirectionally, allowing real-time energy balancing between operator and robot. On the algorithmic front, passivity-based damping, time-domain passivity (TDPA), model-predictive modulation, and, most recently, artificial-intelligence gain tuning all tackle the persistent threats of latency, packet loss, and unexpected contact events.

Although the review stays technology-focused, Professor Zheng acknowledges that frontier demonstrations signal where the next breakthroughs will land. Surgical-robotics prototypes already perform vascular anastomosis and needle biopsies under dual-hand haptics, hinting that cross-border telemedicine could become routine once 5 G and 6 G tactile-internet links mature. Meanwhile, nuclear decommissioning manipulators, deep-sea sampling arms, and on-orbit servicing robots show how richer proprioceptive cues expand the operator’s safe workspace far beyond physical reach.

To keep progress on track, the paper highlights three grand challenges for the coming decade: Multimodal haptics – weaving force, vibration, and temperature into a unified control loop; Network-aware stability – automatically maintaining passivity across heterogeneous, variable-delay links; Benchmarking – establishing standard tasks that pair objective transparency with subjective operator comfort.

“Four-channel architecture plus hybrid control is now the de-facto baseline,” Professor Zheng concludes. “Add intelligent adaptation, multimodal feedback, and rigorous benchmarks, and bilateral teleoperation will redefine what environments humans can interact with—whether separated by meters, kilometers, or the vacuum of space.”