Control of semi-autonomous teleoperation system with time delays

In teleoperation systems operating in complex environments, due to the cognitive limitations of the human operator and lack of complete information about the remote environment, safety and performance of such systems can potentially be comprised. In order to ensure the safety and enhance the efficiency of complex teleoperation systems operating in cluttered environments, in this paper we investigate a semi-autonomous control framework for bilateral teleoperation. The semi-autonomous teleoperation system is composed of heterogeneous master and slave robots, where the slave robot is assumed to be a redundant manipulator. Considering robots with different configurations, and in the presence of dynamic uncertainties and asymmetric communication delays, we first develop a control algorithm to ensure position and velocity tracking in the task space. Additionally in the absence of dynamic uncertainty, and in the presence of human operator and environmental forces, all signals of the proposed teleoperation system are proven to be ultimately bounded. The redundancy of the slave robot is then utilized for achieving autonomous sub-task control, such as singularity avoidance, joint limits, and collision avoidance. The control algorithms for the proposed semi-autonomous teleoperation system are validated through numerical simulations on a non-redundant master and a redundant slave robot.