Time Delay-Free Nonlinear Bilateral Teleoperation With Model-Based Predictive Display

Robotic teleoperation is a difficult task because of the inherent difficulty to model and control time-delay nonlinear models. In order to handle tractable models, typically there have been two ways to tackle this problem: i) The first approach is to assume that the system is fast enough and thus the time delay can be neglected, in this way time-delay-free differential equations are obtained such that the controller is time-delay-free. This approach needs further formal study to validate this assumption, and so far there is neither strict nor rigorous result that support this claim, when considering the full nonlinear telerobotic dyanmics. ii) In the second approach, the time delay is considered explicitly, however typically nonlinear dynamics is neglected and then linear models are used to derive time-delay-based control systems. The second approach ignores that the robots are nonlinear systems with strong nonlinear inertial couplings, and therefore controllers based on linear time-delay models render low performance. In this paper, the teleoperation of robots is modeled, including nonlinear dynamics in the continuous domain, without any time delay, and model-based nonlinear continuous second order sliding mode controllers are proposed which guarantee finite-time convergence. Thus, this approach attempts to propose a scheme for the second approach outlined above. The teleoperation system provides force reflection to the human operator, and a kinematic-based predictive display yields visual stimuli while the master robot yields kinesthetic feedback to the operator to allow planning better desired trajectories, including contact forces, in contrast to other predictive displays that have been proposed in the literature. Therefore, the theoretical foundations of finite-time convergent telecontrol system and its advantages are discussed.