This paper presents a simple and effective force reflecting joystick controller for applications to bilateral teleoperation in construction machinery. First, this controller is a combination of an advanced force reflecting gain tuner and two local adaptive controllers, master and slave. Second, the force reflecting gain tuner is effectively designed using recursive least square method and fuzzy logics to estimate directly and accurately the environmental characteristics and, consequently, to produce properly a force reflection. Third, the local adaptive controllers are simply designed using fuzzy technique and optimized using a smart leaning mechanism to ensure that the slave follows well any given trajectory while the operator is able to achieve truly physical perception of interactions at the remote site. An experimental master-slave manipulator is setup and real-time control tests are carried out under various environmental conditions to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed controller
