Survey on the control of time delay teleoperation systems

In the field of remotely controlled systems, stability is an issue researchers have to deal with. The reason is that usually, in such tasks, time delay occurs, which makes it challenging to design stable controllers. For this reason, more dedicated research has been started to determine the stability properties of time delay systems, particularly of bilateral teleoperation systems, and find stable control strategies. In this paper, authors show that the recent control solutions for time delay teleoperation systems open a new dimension for the interpretation of the basic concepts of controlling systems in general, and make the reevaluation of these concepts necessary. Traditional methods fail in many cases due to stability issues particularly when the time delay is varying or communication blackout occurs. The paper gives a brief overview of different techniques and discusses their applicability.