Design of a New Impedance Controller for a Time Delay Teleoperation System

Abstract

Bilateral teleoperation systems connected to computer networks such as the internet have to deal with varying time delays depending on several factors such as congestion, bandwidth, or distance. Such systems can easily become unstable due to irregular or varying time delays. A passivity concept has been used as the framework to solve the stability problem in bilateral control of teleoperation systems and we demonstrate in this paper how to recover both passivity and tracking performance using a novel control architecture that incorporates time varying gains into the transmission path, feedforward, and feedback position control. Simulation results for a single-degree of freedom master/ slave system are presented which demonstrates the performance of the resulting control architecture.