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Vol: 55(69) No: 4 / December 2010 

Cascade Control for Telehealth Applications
Tamás Haidegger
Department of Control Engineering and Information Technology, BME-IIT Biomedical Engineering Laboratory, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, Magyar tudósok krt. 2, H-1117 Budapest, Hungary, phone: +36-1-463-4027, e-mail: haidegger@iit.bme.hu
Levente Kovács
Department of Control Engineering and Information Technology, BME-IIT Biomedical Engineering Laboratory, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, Magyar tudósok krt. 2, H-1117 Budapest, Hungary, e-mail: lkovacs@iit.bme.hu
Stefan Preitl
Department of Automation and Applied Informatics, “Politehnica” University of Timişoara, Faculty of Automation and Computers, Bd. V. Parvan 2, RO-300223 Timisoara, Romania, phone: +40-256-40-3224, e-mail: stefan.preitl@aut.upt.ro
Radu-Emil Precup
Department of Automation and Applied Informatics, “Politehnica” University of Timişoara, Faculty of Automation and Computers, Bd. V. Parvan 2, RO-300223 Timisoara, Romania, e-mail: radu.precup@aut.upt.ro, web: http://www.aut.upt.ro/~rprecup/
Adalbert Kovács
Department of Mathematics, “Politehnica” University of Timişoara, P-ta Victoriei 2, RO-300006 Timisoara, Romania, phone: +40-256-40-3099, e-mail: adalbert.kovacs@mat.upt.ro, web: https://portal.ct.upt.ro/matematica/default.aspx
Balázs Benyó
Department of Control Engineering and Information Technology, BME-IIT Biomedical Engineering Laboratory, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, Magyar tudósok krt. 2, H-1117 Budapest, Hungary, e-mail: bbenyoiit.bme.hu
Zoltán Benyó
Department of Control Engineering and Information Technology, BME-IIT Biomedical Engineering Laboratory, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Informatics, Magyar tudósok krt. 2, H-1117 Budapest, Hungary, e-mail: benyo@iit.bme.hu


Keywords: teleoperation, master–slave control, latency, telesurgery in space

Abstract
Technology is having a major impact on modern health care. Moreover, it opens entirely new areas, such as telesurgery that allows surgeons to treat patients spatially separated from them. Long distance telesurgery has the potential to extend high quality surgical care even to astronauts in space. However, this requires the effective handling of communication latency. This paper deals with theoretical and practical aspects of the problem: different modeling approaches are discussed. We propose simplified human and machine representations to accommodate long distance telesurgical applications. Further, classical control methods are presented based on cascade control, focusing on teleoperation. A suitable controller can be designed with an extended empirical method for the inner loop, based on Kessler\'s Symmetrical Optimum method, while the outer loop can be based on predictive control.

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