Communication Delay Compensation for Precise Force Matching in Teleoperation

Teleoperation technology is widely employed in the fields of industry and human support. Bilateral control, which is one of the possible methods to achieve teleoperation, enables mutual transmission of operational force of an operator and reaction force from remote environment. However, teleoperation often involves non negligible communication delays, due to the limits of the communication networks. As a countermeasure against communication delays, bilateral control using a force-control-based communication delay compensation has been proposed. This approach is effective in stabilizing system behavior and in maintaining the force states, so that operator’s operational force and reaction force from environment can act in pairs and opposite direction, even during contact tasks. In this paper, we introduce a bilateral control that makes use of a force-control-based communication delay compensation, with a new control structure in which structural redundancy of conventional system is removed. The proposed bilateral control system demonstrates through experiments a stable teleoperation and an accurate force matching performance through experiments.