Event-Triggered Prescribed-Time Fuzzy Control for Space Teleoperation Systems Subject to Multiple Constraints and Uncertainties

Limited by the operation time window and working space, space teleoperation tasks need to be completed within an expected time while ensuring that the end effector meets the physical constraints. Meanwhile, the interaction with unknown environments would cause uncertainty in the closed-loop system, which brings great challenges to the control design. To solve the above problems, the control performance issue for a class of space teleoperation systems subject to multiple constraints and interaction uncertainties is investigated in this article. The force interaction with the human operator/space environment is represented by interval type-2 (IT2) Takagi-Sugeno (T–S) fuzzy systems, where the uncertain equivalent mass and damping parameters can be effectively described and captured by IT2 membership functions. In order to reduce the communication burden and satisfy the constraints of settling time, transient-state performance and operating space, a time-varying threshold event-triggered control scheme together with exponential-type Lyapunov function is developed for the first time. We show that, with the proposed controller, the synchronization tracking errors are guaranteed to converge to a user-defined residual set within preassigned settling time, and never exceed the prescribed range despite unknown control direction and actuator faults, which solves the long-standing constraint issue with more flexibility due to the fact that the related constraints can be arbitrarily specific within the physically available range. Moreover, the convergence set is only dependent on fewer user-defined parameters rather than approximation errors, which provides an effective analysis technique to deal with the difficulty that the convergence accuracy is difficult to calculate quantitatively in the presence of unknown disturbance. Detailed simulation results are provided to show the effectiveness and merit of the proposed control strategy.