A study on predictive-control based teleoperation

Teleoperation with force reflection, also named bilateral teleoperation, has gained more and more attentions in many scenarios of space and terrestrial robotics. It has been applied in many industrial fields such as medical robotics, industrial automation and space robotics. However, problems with non-perfect data transmission, such as time delays severely degrade system performances, are still key issues under investigation by the science and technology society of robotics and control engineering. Many methods to solve the time-delay problem have been proposed. Among them, the passivity and scattering theory provided by Spong and Anderson [4], the wave-variable method proposed by Niemeyer and Slotine [5], sliding- mode control and predictive control are some representative methods which are widely used. The aim of this thesis is to: 1) to build an intuitive bilateral teleoperation platform by using two Quanser devices equipped at the Department of Informatics VII of the Wuerzburg University: 2) under different communication and different environmental conditions, to preliminarily investigate the performance of the designed teleoperation platform with certain control strategies, such as the wave-variables methods and the predictive control method. To achieve the target mentioned above, a bilateral teleoperation platform is designed at first. The corresponding user interface has the ability to simulate different transmission conditions, like different types and values of the time delay. It can also stores the experimental data. In the thesis work, the wave-variable method and the wave-predictive method are implemented respectively in the designed bilateral platform. The wave- variable method could guarantee the passivity of the communication channel by transforming the power variables into wave variables. The wave- predictive method could improve the robustness of the teleoperator and it is more suitable to handle tasks with large time delays such as space missions. Furthermore, to solve the wave-reflection problem induced by the wave transformations, wave filters are applied in the systems. Several experiments of the designed platform are performed under different conditions and their results are compared and analyzed.Validerat; 20101217 (root