An Adaptive Controller for Bilateral Teleoperators: Transatlantic Experiments using the Internet

A bilateral teleoperator is composed of a local and a remote manipulators interconnected through a communication channel. A human operator interacts with the local manipulator to remotely execute a given task via the remote manipulator and the interaction of the remote manipulator with the remote environment is reflected back to the human operator. Thus, the control objective is to establish local and remote position synchronization. This paper employs adaptive control techniques, that can achieve the desired control objective, to an experimental setup composed of two nonlinear manipulators. In these novel experimental results the local and remote manipulators are located in Guadalajara, Mexico, and in Barcelona, Spain, respectively. The manipulators are two Sensable's PHANToM Omni (R) devices and are interconnected through the Internet. It is shown, experimentally, that the adaptive controllers provide asymptotic stability of the local and remote position error even in the presence of variable time-delays.