Guaranteed cost control design for delayed teleoperation systems

A procedure for guaranteed cost control design of delayed linear bilateral teleoperation systems with nonlinear external forces is proposed. The assumption that the external forces are nonlinear functions of velocities and/or positions of local devices, and one part of these forces satisfies a sector condition has been made. A virtual tool system is introduced to 'observe' the forces at the remote sides, the position and velocity information of the master, the slave and the virtual tool are feedbacked to the controllers, hence the proposed control scheme actually has a four-channel architecture. A delay-dependent stability criterion is formulated, and then a sub-optimal guaranteed cost controller is obtained by solving a convex optimization problem in the form of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). The behavior of the resulting teleoperation system is illustrated in simulations.