Teleoperation systems over the Internet: Experimental validation of a bilateral Generalized Predictive Controller

This paper presents an experimental validation of an extension of the Generalized Predictive Controller (GPC), called Bilateral GPC (BGPC), on a teleoperation system in the presence of communication delays, packet losses and slave force feedback. Contrary to usual GPC, the proposed approach allows to take into account the case where the reference trajectory is not a priori known. This difficulty is due to the slave force feedback which alters the master reference trajectory. Some stability and robustness issues are examined in the frequency domain with a comparison to those obtained with a PID controller. The proposed BGPC ensures robust stability in the presence of environment and transmission time-delays uncertainties. For the experimentations, the communication network is Internet using UDP protocol while the slave robot is a 6-DOF anthropomorphic robot with a force sensor. All the presented results have been obtained between the site of the Laboratory of Vision and Robotic, Bourges, France, and the site of the Department of Technique and Management of Industrial Systems, Vicenza, Italy (distance ≈ 1000 km).