Predictive Control Design for Uncertain Bilateral Teleoperation Systems

Time delay in both forward and backward communication channels and also the corresponding uncertainties in both the delays and task environment have always been considered as restricting factors in the performance of bilateral teleoperation systems which in many cases lead to instability of such systems. To this end, in this paper, the control framework is proposed for bilateral teleoperation systems with two local controllers namely master and the slave controller. Master controller is designed based upon Model Predictive Control and aims at forward time delay compensation, force tracking and stability maintenance. On the other hand, slave controller is a traditional Proportional-Derivative controller with the role of position tracking in the system. Furthermore, in the core of the proposed control framework, a Smith Predictor is utilized to compensate for the time delay in backward path. Simulation results exhibit the effectiveness of the proposed control framework against relatively large time delays.