Fault-Tolerant Control of Teleoperation Systems with Flexible-Link Slave Robot and Disturbance Compensation

This study addresses the control problem of a teleoperation system with the slave flexible-link in the face of time delay, dynamic uncertainties, disturbances, and actuator faults. In the presence of actuator failures or when unknown disturbances act on the master and slave manipulators, the teleoperation system will be more likely to face the performance degradation and even instability. This paper proposes a simple proportional-derivative controller in conjunction with a disturbance observer and an auxiliary controller. Advantages of the proposed control law include its simple structure and no requirement for fault detection and isolation mechanism; thus, it is appropriate for implementation. Additive appealing features are that the controller can compensate dynamic uncertainties, disturbances, and actuator failures. Using a Lyapunov function, it is demonstrated that all the signals in the closed-loop system are ensured to be ultimately bounded. Simulation results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed controller.