Position and force tracking in nonlinear teleoperation systems under varying delays

Abstract

SUMMARY In this paper, a novel control scheme is proposed to guarantee position and force tracking in nonlinear teleoperation systems subject to varying communication delays. Stability and tracking performance of the teleoperation system are proved using a proposed Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional. To show its effectiveness, the teleoperation controller is simulated on a pair of planar 2-DOF (degree of freedom) robots and experimented on a pair of 3-DOF PHANToM Premium 1.5A robots connected via a communication channel with time-varying delays. Both the planar robots in simulations and the PHANToM robots in experiments possess nonlinear dynamics.