Bilateral Transparent Teleoperation with Long Time-Varying Delay: New Control Design and Stability Analysis

Abstract

This paper presents a novel structure design for bilateral teleoperation control systems with large varying time delay in communication channel. The goal of this paper is to achieve transparency and stability of the closed-loop system. To achieve transparency, two local controllers are designed for bilateral teleoperation. One local controller is responsible for tracking the master commands and the other local controller is in charge of force tracking as well as guaranteeing the stability of the closed-loop system in presence of varying time delay in communication channel. A neural network estimates this time delay. In addition, the stability of the closed-loop system, despite estimation error in neural network, will be shown by some analytical work. The advantages of the porposed method are stability, simple design of the local controllers, and transparency of the system. As a result, the designer has the flexibility to choose classical methods as well as intelligent controllers for local controllers. Simulation results show very good performance of the proposed method. Furthermore, the stability of teleoperation system can be checked graphically with bode method. Hence, the controller design would be simple.