Advanced Finite-Time Control for Bilateral Teleoperators with Delays and Uncertainties

In this paper, a finite-time control method is presented for bilateral teleoperators to ensure coordination of the master and slave manipulators in the presence of time-varying delays, external disturbances, and dynamic uncertainties. Without the requirement of acceleration measurement, the master and slave manipulators are assured to coordinate with each other within finite time in free motion. Additionally, the coordination errors are ensured to converge to a neighborhood of the origin in finite time. In the constrained motion, where both the master and slave manipulators are affected by unknown external force from the human operator and the removed environment, the bilateral teleoperation system is proved to be stably provided a certain degree of transparency performance during operation. Stability and finite-time tracking are investigated via Lyapunov-Krasovskii theory for the bilateral teleoperation system under time-varying delays and external forces. Subsequently, numerical examples and experiments are presented to demonstrate the efficiency and efficacy of the proposed control approach for teleoperators.