  The possibility of operating in remote environments using teleoperation
systems has been considered widely in the control literature. This paper
presents a review on the discrete-time teleoperation systems, including issues
such as stability, passivity and time delays. Using discrete-time methods for a
master-slave teleoperation system can simplify control implementation.
Varieties of control schemes have been proposed for these systems and major
concerns such as passivity, stability and transparency have been studied.
Recently, unreliable communication networks affected by packet loss and
variable transmission delays have been received much attention. Thus, it is
worth considering discrete-time theories for bilateral teleoperation
architectures, which are formulated on the same lines as the continuous-time
systems. Despite the extensive amount of researches concerning continuous-time
teleoperation systems, only a few papers have been published on the analysis
and controller design for discrete bilateral forms. This paper takes into
account the challenges for the discrete structure of bilateral teleoperation
systems and notifies the recent contributions in this area. The effect of
sampling time on the stability-transparency trade-off and the task performance
is taken into consideration in this review. These studies can help to design
guidelines to have better transparency and stable teleoperation systems.
