Towards variable-time-delays-robust telemanipulation through master state prediction

This paper presents the conceptual framework and simulation results on a general technique for time delay compensation in teleoperation, based on the prediction of the human arm position and force, i.e. effectively the master state. This is shown to be significantly less complex and more intuitive than predicting the slave and environment dynamics. Simple polynomial or spline predictors, employing no knowledge of the human arm dynamics, are shown to produce good performance for small time delays when the master force and position are smooth. However, for real life force profiles, better performance is achieved by employing a human arm model and predicting the neural input to it