Fuzzy sliding control of a force reflecting telerobotic system

This paper proposes a new approach to achieve stable force reflecting teleoperation control under time delay-fuzzy sliding control (FSC). FSC is based on the conventional sliding mode control which has been proved robust and stable. The design methodology of FSC includes the following major parts: a fuzzy sliding control law, rule tuning in the phase plane, and soft boundary layer tuning. Stable force reflecting control has been a popular research topic in telerobotics since the 1960s. Because of the stability and robustness of FSC, and the linguistic inference style of fuzzy control, FSC can be easily modified and applied to deal with the uncertainties and human interactions in teleoperation. In our research, a novel control structure which consists of a FSC and a fuzzy supervisor has been implemented in a high bandwidth master-slave telerobotic system. It has been shown that this approach has stable force reflecting and good tracking accuracy for loop delays up to seconds. Experiment results are described in the paper.