Bilateral Control Of Teleoperation Systems Subject To Varying Time Delays

Bilateral control of teleoperation systems subject to varying time delays

Researchers: Farzad Hashemzadeh, Iraj Hassanzadeh, Mahdi Tavakoli

Summary:

Using a telerobotic system, a human operator can carry out tasks in a remote environment. Teleoperation performance is greatly enhanced if haptic feedback about interaction occurring between the remote robot and the remote environment is provided to the human operator through the local robot. In telerobotic applications where there is a distance between the local and the remote robots, there will inevitably be a time delay in the communication channel between the two robots, which can reduce the transparency and destabilize the telerobotic system.

Various control schemes have been developed to compensate for the time delay in teleoperation, most of which are based on the passivity theory, which is inspired from energy interaction between interconnected systems. A recent method is the synchronization-based approach in which power signals (rather than wave signals) continue to be transmitted in the communication channel. In this project, we are interested in developing a new control scheme to guarantee the stability of the bilateral teleoperation system and to synchronize the behavior of the local and the remote robots in the presence of varying time delays in the communication channel. Varying communication time delays are experienced, for example, in Internet-based teleoperation.