A simple structure for bilateral transparent teleoperation systems with time delay

This paper presents a simple structure design for bilateral teleoperation systems with uncertainties in time delay in communication channel. The goal is to achieve complete transparency and robust stability for the closed-loop system. For transparency, two local controllers are designed for the bilateral teleoperation systems. One local controller is responsible for tracking the master commands, and the other one is in charge of force tracking as well as guaranteeing the stability of the closed-loop system in the presence of uncertainties in time delay. The stability analysis will be shown analytically for two cases: (I) the possibly stability and (II) the intrinsically stability. Moreover, in Case II, in order to generate the proper inputs for the master controller in the presence of uncertainties in time delay, an adaptive finite impulse response (FIR) filter is designed to estimate the time delay. The advantages of the proposed method are threefold: (1) stability of the closed-loop system is guaranteed under some mild conditions, (2) the whole system is transparent, and (3) design of the local controllers is simple. Simulation results show good performance of the proposed method.