Consensus of Multi-slave Bilateral Teleoperation System with Time-Varying Delays

This paper studies the consensus problem for teleoperation system over communication networks. Compared with previous work, both multi-slave configuration and time variable delays are considered. According to the topology structure of slave robots, centralized and distributed consensus controllers are respectively designed, where a leader-following strategy is adopted. During the design process of distributed controllers, min-weighted rigid graph is used to optimize the topology structure of slave robots. With the optimized topology, the amount of communication links and energy dissipations in slave site can be reduced. Moreover, the sufficient stability conditions are presented to show the consensus controllers can stabilize the master-slave system under variable time delay. Finally, simulation results are performed to show the effectiveness of the main results.