Automerlin mobile robot's bilateral telecontrol with random delay

Abstract

The main focus of this work is to design a bilateral telecontrol of a mobile robot AutoMerlin through the Internet. The Internet has an inherent delay, packet drop, out of order data transmission, duplication, and other impediments as a communication channel. These factors cause the system to become unstable and difficult to control through the Internet. The velocity tracking becomes really hard and the force feedback also rises to an unacceptable level due to delay and other impediments. In order to address these issues, a power based TDPC (Time Domain Passivity Control) has been utilized in this work for the development of stable telecontrol. This approach is based on energy. The energy has been classified as positive and negative energy to make passivity analysis independent of monitoring of net system energy in real time. Thus, monitoring the net energy output at each port enables the extension of TDPC for delayed systems called TDPN (Time Delay Power Network). TDPN helps in velocity/force tracking. It transmits velocity/force unaltered by rejecting the active energy. PO (Passivity Observers) indicate the active behavior and the PC (Passivity Controllers) dissipate extra surplus energy to keep the system stable and passive all times. The performance has been tested and plotted to show the effectiveness of the bilateral controller under random delay and other limitations.