Telesurgery means the remote application of interventional medical techniques; a concept
that is currently widely practiced around the world for short distance through master–slave
robot systems. The concept has the potential to service long distance telesurgery
as well. However, this requires the effective handling of communication latency. The
current paper suggests a fuzzy control solution for telesurgical applications aiming
at the alleviation of the disturbing effects of large latencies with the concept of
remote surgical robotics. The fuzzy control solution is supported by a cascade control
system structure with two proportional–integral–derivative (PID) controllers in the
inner and outer control loops and designed by Kessler’s Extended Symmetrical Optimum
empirical criteria. The PID controller in the outer loop is next replaced by Takagi–Sugeno–Kong
PID–fuzzy controllers which combine several separately designed PID controllers. The
combination of separately designed PID controllers and the modal equivalence principle
are expressed as a design and tuning method of the Tagaki–Sugeno–Kong PID–fuzzy controllers.
