Bilateral teleoperation through the Internet

This paper proposes a stable control structure for the bilateral teleoperation of robots through Internet. The problem is motivated by the increasing use of the Internet as a communication channel. Internet has a time-varying delay which depends on factors such as congestion, bandwidth and distance. In this work, we propose a control structure for the teleoperation of a manipulator robot with force feedback. Such a control structure includes state controllers (placed on the local and remote sites) and a time-delay compensation, which modifies the delayed position command generated by the human operator using the force that he feels in such a delayed moment and the current force between the slave and the remote environment. In addition, the proposed control scheme is designed considering a model of the communication channel. Finally, experiments of bilateral teleoperation of robots through Intranet and Internet are shown to test the performance and stability of the designed teleoperation system.