Experimental Analysis of an Internet-Based Bilateral Teleoperation System With Motion and Force Scaling Using a Model Predictive Controller

Abstract

This paper presents an experimental investigation of a bilateral generalized predictive controller for scaled teleoperation systems subject to slave force feedback, variable transmission-time delays, and packet losses. The originality of the approach proposed mainly lies in its capacity to take into account explicitly the slave force feedback in the predictive algorithm. Experimental results show the system stability with the proposed approach using a frequency-domain technique. Several configurations of scaling factors have been used; it is shown that the stability conditions strongly depend of the external environment. Another experimental result verify the robust performances of the approach in terms of tracking behavior with both strong variations of time delays and packet losses in the communication network. For the experimentations, the communication network is the Internet using user-datagram protocol, while the slave robot is a 6-DOF anthropomorphic robot with a force sensor.