Model-free control of bilateral robotic teleoperation with delays and prescribed performance guarantees

Abstract

In this work, we address the problem of bilateral teleoperation in the presence of communication delays between two robotic manipulators, the leader, operated by a human, and the follower. To this end, we propose a novel state-feedback control design, based on the Prescribed Performance Control (PPC) methodology, that enforces the output tracking error between leader and follower to evolve strictly within pre-specified bounds. Moreover, all signals in the closed loop system remain bounded. The proposed method is validated via human-in-the-loop simulation experiments.