Improving Force Reflecting Teleoperation

Bilateral force feedback teleoperation provides the operator with an enhanced realtime understanding of the remote slave environment. Closed loop bilateral teleoperation via a communications path which has no clearly defined or predictable delay time presents difficulty in maintaining both robust stability and adequate system performance for all delay conditions. The work presented in this book results in a new teleoperator architecture which: 1) improves wave based teleoperator transient response for the tasks of position tracking and contact stability without the need for prior knowledge of the remote environment; 2) enhances force feedback fidelity, with particular focus on the ability to use the teleoperator in complex nonlinear environments such as stick-slip friction; 3) guarantees stable operation of the teleoperation without prior knowledge of the communications delay. This book is suitable for scientists, design engineers, and graduate students who find themselves interested utilising bilateral force feedback teleoperation across modern day packet based communications systems.