Control of teleoperators with communication time delay through state convergence

This paper describes a new control method of teleoperation systems with communication time delay. This method models the teleoperation system in the state space, considering all the possible interactions that could appear in the operator-master-slave-environment set, and it uses the Taylor expansion to model the time delay. The control system allows that the slave manipulator follows the master in spite of the time delay in the communication channel. The tracking is achieved by state convergence between the master and the slave. The method is also able to establish the desired dynamics of this convergence and the dynamics of the slave manipulator. Furthermore, a simple design procedure is provided to obtain the control system gains. These control gains are calculated solving a set of seven equations. The control method is robust to the uncertainty of the design parameters, so it is not necessary to obtain good estimations of these parameters. Simulations and experiments with a one DOF teleoperation. system are presented to verify the control method. (C) 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.