Modeling and Control of Teleoperated Manipulator System Based on Hybrid Control Method

A method based on hybrid control theory for modeling and control of teleoperated manipulator system is presented in this paper. In telerobotic systems, human operator plays the role of a command generator which produces commands in real time according to information fed back. However, telerobotic system is a heterogeneous system and the heterogeneity can be characterized by the fact that humans are intelligent while robots are fast, powerful and accurate. Human operator is different from autonomous planner in robotic systems in that he can not generate continuous control inputs to the remote robot. As a result, telerobotic system is a typical hybrid system which contains both continuous-time and discrete event dynamics. Specifically, the robot can be considered as a continuous-time system described customarily by differential equations or difference equations, and the human operator can be modeled by an automaton. A hybrid framework is of key importance for the study of such a system. The problems to be discussed in this paper include developing a framework in which both the robotic system and the human operator can be modeled simultaneously, and introducing how to implement this framework in a real teleoperated manipulator system.