Adaptive/robust control for enhanced teleoperation under communication time delay

Control of time-delay bilateral teleoperation systems requires a delicate balance between the conflicting requirements of transparency and robust stability. This manuscript proposes a systematic design procedure for improving teleoperation fidelity while maintaining its stability in the presence of constant communication delay and dynamic uncertainty. In a two-step control approach, first local Lyapunov-based adaptive/nonlinear controllers linearize the master/slave dynamics. Teleoperation coordination is then achieved by formulating an input/output (I/O) time-delay H_infin robust control synthesis which is solved via decomposition to adobe problems. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated via numerical analysis and experimental results.