A study on predictive-control based teleoperation

Abstract: Teleoperation with force reflection, also named bilateral teleoperation,
has gained more and more attentions in many scenarios of space and
terrestrial robotics. It has been applied in many industrial fields such as
medical robotics, industrial automation and space robotics. However,
problems with non-perfect data transmission, such as time delays severely
degrade system performances, are still key issues under investigation by
the science and technology society of robotics and control engineering.
Many methods to solve the time-delay problem have been proposed. Among
them, the passivity and scattering theory provided by Spong and Anderson
[4], the wave-variable method proposed by Niemeyer and Slotine [5], sliding-
mode control and predictive control are some representative methods which
are widely used.

The aim of this thesis is to: 1) to build an intuitive bilateral
teleoperation platform by using two Quanser devices equipped at the
Department of Informatics VII of the Wuerzburg University: 2) under
different communication and different environmental conditions, to
preliminarily investigate the performance of the designed teleoperation
platform with certain control strategies, such as the wave-variables
methods and the predictive control method.

To achieve the target mentioned above, a bilateral teleoperation platform
is designed at first. The corresponding user interface has the ability to
simulate different transmission conditions, like different types and values
of the time delay. It can also stores the experimental data. In the thesis
work, the wave-variable method and the wave-predictive method are
implemented respectively in the designed bilateral platform. The wave-
variable method could guarantee the passivity of the communication channel
by transforming the power variables into wave variables. The wave-
predictive method could improve the robustness of the teleoperator and it
is more suitable to handle tasks with large time delays such as space
missions. Furthermore, to solve the wave-reflection problem induced by the
wave transformations, wave filters are applied in the systems. Several
experiments of the designed platform are performed under different
conditions and their results are compared and analyzed.