• Transactions of the Korean Society of Mechanical Engineers B
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• v.35 no.11
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• pp.1199-1204
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• 2011

The capability to bilaterally telemanipulate soft-tissues for medical applications could increase the quality of telemanipulation systems. Since most soft-tissue manipulation tasks include constrained motion interacting with an unknown and dynamic bioenvironment through contact, bilateral telemanipulation raises problems due to stability and transparency issues. It is well understood that knowledge of environments plays an important role in pursuing transparent telemanipulation and achieving telepresence, and in particular, online estimation of environmental parameters with an explicit environment model can improve these systems' performance. In this study, a continuum mechanics-based environment model with an online environmental property estimation algorithm and an adaptive telemanipulation control scheme is proposed. The proposed method can improve the telemanipulation performance in terms of stability and transparency and can offer valuable information (e.g., elastic modulus of soft tissues) pertaining to diagnostic examinations.