Adaptive control of a macro/micro bilateral teleoperation system under variable time delay

In this paper a new stable adaptive control for a Macro- Micro bilateral teleoperation system is proposed. Our platform to implement the controllers consists of a servo DC motor (macro) as the master robot and a piezo-actuator (micro) as the slave robot. Piezo-actuator has some characteristics which disturb the transparency and stability of the teleoperation system. We add a nonlinear disturbance observer to the slave robot controller in order to observe and compensate the disturbances. It is recognized that the presence of time delay is one of the largest barriers in teleoperation systems. This problem is mainly due to the distance separating the master from the slave and also is due to lag effect of filters and motor drivers. Because the time delay is unknown and variable, it can make the system unstable. In this paper, all of the above controllers are discussed using variable time delay. The stability of the system under variable time delay is guaranteed by Lyapunov stability criterion and passivity based methods. Tracking of force/position is achieved by selecting the best design parameters. Performance of the proposed control is validated by experimental results.