Teleoperation of Mobile Robots With Time-Varying Delay

This paper proposes a stable control scheme for teleoperation of mobile robots with visual feedback in presence of time-varying delay. The proposed control scheme is based on using a model of the human operator to combine (on the remote site) the velocity command generated by the human operator in a delayed time instant, the received information (which stimulates the operator) in such moment, and the current state of the remote site to set the velocity reference, which is applied to the mobile robot. In addition, the proposed control scheme does not modify the information sent from the remote site to the local site. On the other hand, the proposed scheme uses estimated parameters of the human operator and a fictitious force, which is calculated using data fusion from ultrasonic sensors and optical flow field taken from panoramic images. To illustrate the performance and stability of the proposed control structure, several teleoperation experiments between Argentina and Brazil linked via Internet are shown.