Bilateral teleoperation under time-varying communication time delay considering contact with environment

With recent popularization of the Internet, bilateral control systems which are robust to fluctuant and unpredictable time delay are desirable. In such a situation, communication disturbance observer (CDOB) has been proposed as a control method for fluctuant and unpredictable time delay in bilateral teleoperation. It compensates time delay using disturbance observer by considering the effect of communication delay on the system as acceleration dimensional disturbance. Since this method cannot separate network disturbance from contact force exerted on a slave, force response of the slave transmitted to the master side is not precise. This paper presents a method for separating network disturbance from the contact force exerted on the slave. By producing the compensation value using separated network disturbance, the force response value of the slave is transmitted to the master side more precisely. The validity of the proposed method is verified by experimental results.