Bilateral telecontrol of AutoMerlin mobile robot with fix communication delay

Abstract

This paper addresses bilateral telecontrol of a motor vehicle type mobile robot AutoMerlin, with constant communication delay over local area network (LAN) having communication impediments like packet drop, duplication, out of order etc, similar to Internet. The proposed telecontrol scheme enables the human operator to teleoperate the AutoMerlin mobile robot by maneuvering a haptic force feedback joystick. The force acting on the remote robot has been rendered to the human operator. The sensation of this force has been provided to human operator via haptic force feedback joystick. This force alerts the operator about the presence of obstacles in the vicinity of mobile robot and enables him to avoid them and perform teleoperation conveniently. Time Delay Power Network (TDPN) has been applied to extend the notion of Time Domain Passivity Control (TDPC) to bilateral telecontrol of mobile robot with delay. Communication channel has been modeled as a Two-port network. The energy entering and leaving each port has been correlated to calculate active energy. Passivity Observers (PO) and Passivity Controllers (PC) have been implemented using TDPN to keep the Two-port network passive. Stability has been analyzed and experimental results have proven the feasibility of the proposed approach for teleoperation.