Passivity framework and traffic reduction for the teleoperation of a gantry crane

Teleoperation over shared networks like Internet can take advantage of the deadband approach to reduce data traffic. In this work a passivity-based framework to teleoperate a three-dimensional force-feedback system with deadband control is designed and implemented. The teleoperated slave is a gantry crane and the teleoperation master is a haptic device controlled by a human operator. A deadband reconstruction algorithm based on energy supervision is presented, which preserves passivity of the deadband controlled communication for arbitrary time delays. Experiments to determine the framework parameters are made, and they shows that the passivity of the whole system is preserved, even with variable delays.