Bilateral teleoperation of a wheeled mobile robot over delayed communication network

Abstract

We consider bilateral teleoperation of a wheeled mobile robot over communication channels with constant delays. Our main objective is to enable humans to control the mobile robot much as they drive a car: i.e. by operating a master haptic joystick, they can control the linear velocity and heading angle of the mobile robot, much like they do so with the gas pedal and steering wheel. Passivity of the closed-loop system is also enforced so that, even with communication delays, humans can stably and safely teleoperate the wheeled mobile robot with force-reflection. A semi-experiment (i.e. real master/simulated slave) is performed to validate the proposed framework