Adaptive control of teleoperation systems

In this paper, an adaptive control technology is presented, which has certain application potential to teleoperation of X-ray machines. The focus of this technology is on transparency which is an important concept for teleoperation systems. In a transparent teleoperation, the human operator feels as if to manipulate the slave environment directly. When a teleoperation system is known, a fixed controller can be designed to ensure a teleoperation control system stable and transparent. In this case, system transparency is achieved in terms of impedance matching. However, when the parameters of a teleoperation system are unknown, exact impedance matching is impossible and new concepts of transparency are needed. Several suitable adaptive control schemes are developed for control of a teleoperation system with unknown parameters of different types: Those with constant values, those with jumping values, and those with smooth but large time-varying values. Associated with different situations of adaptive control systems, different new transparency concepts are introduced and verified by analysis and simulation results.