Virtual reality enhanced bilateral teleoperation with communication constraints

In force reflecting teleoperator systems, the existence of even small communication delays and jitters may lead to transparency deterioration and instability. An alternative approach to the delayed force feedback is to design a virtual environment (VE) on the master side that duplicates the essential features of the remote slave-environment interconnection. In this work, we present an approach to the design of VE-enhanced force reflecting teleoperation in presence of network induced communication constraints. The approach is based on using an approximate discrete-time model of the remote slave/environment interconnection, which is implemented on the master side together with certain observation/identification/prediction mechanism that allows to approximately recover the current state/parameters of the remote environment based on delayed and possibly distorted measurement data. A control algorithm and a communication protocol are designed which guarantee the stability of the overall teleoperator system in the presence of network induced communication constraints if the loss of the information during communication is sufficiently small.