A two flow expression method of four-channel bilateral control system with time delay and validation of model-free time delay compensator

Bilateral control is one of the control methods for teleoperation system. The presence of network delays between a master robot and a slave robot makes the design of bilateral control system challengeable. It seriously deteriorates the performance and possibly makes the system unstable. In this paper, to overcome the destabilization from network delay, the model-free time delay compensator is proposed. The proposed compensator does not utilize time delay model and plant model, but the bilateral control system is stabilized. The stability of the proposed control system is shown by using two flow expression method. Two flow expression method models the master system and the slave system of four-channel bilateral control system as single input and single output system. This method makes the analysis for the stability and the performance of the four-channel bilateral control system simple. The validity of the proposed model-free time delay compensator is confirmed by numerical and experimental results.