Bilateral teleoperation of multiple agents with formation control

This paper studies the formation problem for multi-slave teleoperation system over general communication networks, where multiple mobile slave agents are coupled with a single master robot. The forward and backward network transmission time delays are assumed to be asymmetric and time-varying. Due to the quantization in the network, a dynamic quantization strategy is provided to quantize the output signals of the master robot and slave agents before transmitting. Then, a novel master-slave protocol is designed to achieve the formation task under variable time delays and quantization. Additionally, the sufficient conditions for stability are presented to show that the formation protocol can stabilize the master-slave system under variable time delays and quantization. Finally, simulation are performed to show effectiveness of the main results.