Gain-Scheduling Control of a Teleoperation System

This paper presents a control design framework for robust teleoperation. The teleoperation system with uncertainties is modeled as a linear parameter varying plant to employ the gain-scheduling control framework. The time-varying transmission delay, disturbances, and uncertainty of the environment are considered in the design of the control. The usual assumption that the human operator and the environment are passive is not made in this method. The control scheme employs an online estimation of the environment including disturbance and transmission time delay between master and slave. Simulation results show that position and force tracking errors are small, and the system shows stable behavior in spite of the uncertainties. A transparency analysis in the frequency domain shows that the developed control scheme guarantees perfect transparency in the low frequencies.