Bilateral teleoperation technology has caused wide attentions due to its applications in various remote operation systems. The communication delay becomes one of the main challenging issues in the teleoperation control design. Meanwhile, various nonlinearities, parameter variations, and modeling uncertainties existing in manipulator and environment dynamics need to be considered carefully in order to achieve good control performance. In this paper, a globally stable nonlinear adaptive robust control algorithm is developed for bilateral teleoperation systems to deal with these control issues. Namely, the unknown dynamical parameters of the environmental force are estimated online by the improved least square adaptation law. A novel communication structure is proposed where only the master position signal is transmitted to the slave side for the tracking design, and the online estimators of the environmental parameters are transmitted from the slave to the master to replace the traditional environmental force measurement. Because the estimated environmental parameters are not power signals, the passivity problem of the communication channel and the trade-off limitation between the transparency performance and robust stability in traditional teleoperation control are essentially avoided. The nonlinear adaptive robust control is subsequently developed to deal with nonlinearities, unknown parameters, and modeling uncertainties of the master, slave, and environmental dynamics, so that the guaranteed transient and steady-state transparency performance can be achieved. The experiments on two voice-coil motor-driven manipulators are carried out, and the comparative results verify that the proposed control algorithm achieves the excellent control performance and the guaranteed robust stability simultaneously under time delays.
INTRODUCTIONBilateral teleoperation systems are designed for human operator to manipulate the remote and/or hazardous operation tasks, where the master manipulator is operated by human and provides motion comments to the slave manipulator, which is performing the actual task. The wide applications of bilateral teleoperation systems include outer space and underwater exploration, nuclear plant handing, surgical operations, vehicle steering, and so on [1].The control objectives of bilateral teleoperation systems consist of two parts: stability and transparency. The closed-loop system needs to be stable under various human operations and environment behaviors. Transparency means the quality of the connection between the remote environment and the human operator, as felt by the operator. Many control methods have been developed to realize these control goals. The passivity-based control [2-4] is usually used to enforce the passivity of the whole teleoperation system, ensuring the closed-loop stability. A four channel transmission architecture is introduced in [5, 6], where the velocity and force signals are transmitted between the master and slave side in order to achieve good transparency performance. T...