Stability analysis of nonlinear telerobotic systems with time-varying communication channel delays using general integral inequalities

Existing controller synthesis schemes for teleoperation of nonlinear master-slave systems with time-varying communication channel are subject to conservative stability criteria. This paper presents a new stability criteria for bilateral tele-operation systems with proportional-derivative, position-position and position-force control architectures, considering both passive/non-passive human operator. The communication channel pertains unknown asymmetric time-varying delays with given lower and upper-bounds. Using the Lyapunov Krasovskii approach, the stability analysis of the dynamic system is examined and the stability conditions are derived in the form of Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs). Advanced techniques have been employed to find less conservative integral inequalities in the process of stability analysis of the closed-loop teleoperator. Illustrative numerical examples and simulation results emphasize the effectiveness of the proposed stability criteria in enlarging the stability bounds and providing efficient control performances. (C) 2018 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.