A Novel Wave-Variable Based Time-Delay Compensated Four-Channel Control Design for Multilateral Teleoperation System

Multilateral teleoperation system, which is regarded as an extension of bilateral teleoperation system, is a significant issue and becomes a hotspot in recent years to improve the ability of multiple robots to coordinate and perform efficiently and accurately in the complicated, dangerous and remote working environment. In this paper, a four-channel multilateral teleoperation control problem is discussed, where n masters control the n slaves to handle dangerous, unknown, and complicated tasks remotely under time varying delays in the communication channel. A novel multilateral teleoperation system combining the time-delay compensator by the novel wave transform and four-channel architecture is built to meet the demands of the communication among multiple masters and slaves, where the weighing coefficients are provided to perform different weighed commands. The two design parameters are provided separately in the time-delay compensator to optimize the signal transmission and guarantee the stability in the four-channel architecture, and the ideal transparency conditions are theoretically derived to simultaneously achieve the stability and good transparency performance for multilateral teleoperation system. The practical experiments are carried out on a 2-master-2-slave teleoperation system to vilify the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme.