Nonlinear bilateral teleoperators with non-collocated remote controller over delayed network

Remote robots in bilateral teleoperation systems are utilized to accomplish various missions in different locations, which are generally far away from local robots collocated with a human operator. In order to enhance flexibility of teleoperators with extensive applicability, this paper proposed a novel control framework, where the remote controller is non-collocated with the robot in the environment. In contrast to traditional teleoperation systems, the remote robot only needs to send out sensory information and receive control commands from the local side. Stability and transparency of the proposed teleoperators are studied for PD-like controller with fixed time delays, and P-like controller with time-varying delays. If the control gains are contingent to upper bounds of time delays, then the system is stable with guaranteed position tracking and force reflection. Numerical simulations and experiments were conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithms in bilateral teleoperation.