Position Measurement Based Slave Torque Feedback Control for Teleoperation Systems With Time-Varying Communication Delays

Bilateral teleoperation system is referred to as a promising technology to extend human actions and intelligence to manipulating objects remotely. For the tracking control of teleoperation systems, velocity measurements are necessary to provide feedback information. However, due to hardware technology and cost constraints, the velocity measurements are not always available. In addition, the time-varying communication delay makes it challenging to achieve tracking task. This paper provides a solution to the issue of real-time tracking for teleoperation systems, subjected to unavailable velocity signals and time-varying communication delays. In order to estimate the velocity information, immersion and invariance (I & I) technique is employed to develop an exponential stability velocity observer. For the proposed velocity observer, a linear relationship between position and observation state is constructed, through which the need of solving partial differential and certain integral equations can be avoided. Meanwhile, the mean value theorem is exploited to separate the observation error terms, and hence, all functions in our observer can be analytically expressed. With the estimated velocity information, a slave-torque feedback control law is presented. A novel Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional is constructed to establish asymptotic tracking conditions. In particular, the relationship between the controller design parameters and the allowable maximum delay values is provided. Finally, simulation and experimental results reveal that the proposed velocity observer and controller can guarantee that the observation errors and tracking error converge to zero.