Time Delay Compensation and Stability Issues in Teleoperation

Abstract

Abstract The stability of teleoperation over the Internet is a growing research area. The unknown time delays of the data transmission, however, compromise performance and stability. It is assumed in this work that force information is not available which is the case for most commercial haptic devices. This paper examines two approaches to this challenging problem. The first approach focuses on using Kalman filters to predict, at the local haptic device, the present state of the remote haptic device. In this way, the time delays can be made to seem as if they did not exist. Simulation results are presented on experimental data to verify this technique. The second approach is to employ haptic devices which are mechanically designed to have linear dynamics. It is shown that our proposed feedback configuration is stable for all gains, up to a maximum time delay which can be precomputed. Experimental results are presented.