Generalized Bilateral MIMO Control by States Convergence with time delay and application for the teleoperation of a 2-DOF helicopter

Bilateral Control by States Convergence is a novel and little exploited control strategy that has been successfully applied to the teleoperation of robotic manipulators using SISO control. Based on the state space representation, the main philosophy of this control strategy consists in achieving convergence of states between the master and the slave, by setting the dynamical behavior of the master-slave error as a states-independent autonomous system. This paper presents a generalization of this strategy to MIMO systems, with time delay in the master-slave communication channels. It is demonstrated how the feedback gains required by the state convergence control schema can be found by solving a set of ((m × n) + (m × m) + n ) nonlinear equations for a system with m inputs, n states and m outputs. Unlike previous research, which has been applied only to manipulators considering 1-DOF for the states-convergence control loop, the extension to the general MIMO case has allowed to apply the technique to the teleoperation of a 2-DOF helicopter. A decoupling network and states-feedback are used for local control, while the states-convergence control manages the bilateral issues. Simulation results are presented, showing a satisfactory performance of the control strategy.