Modeling, design, and evaluation of advanced teleoperator control systems with short time delay

Abstract

A real-time teleoperator control system designed to achieve desired performance and robustness under shared compliance control and short time delays of up to a few seconds is evaluated. In the design, telemonitoring force feedback is introduced as a new form of kinesthetic coupling; dynamic characteristics of the master and slave arms are actively modified based on generalized impedance control according to local design criteria; the human dynamics involved in generating a control command based on visual and force stimuli are incorporated into the controller design; and to balance the robustness/performance trade-off, system performance is optimized subject to a known maximum time delay. Simulation results suggest that the system is superior to conventional systems in terms of performance and robustness under short time delays and human control errors. Experimental evidence is presented to supports the advantages of the proposed telemonitoring force feedback. An experimental method for further validating the human dynamic model is described. >