Vibration suppression and coordination control of bilateral teleoperation system for flexible-link manipulator with communication delay

Bilateral teleoperation (BT) systems can expand the working capabilities of human operators in remote, unstructured, and hazardous environments, and can be applied in a wide range of fields such as nuclear detection, surgery, mining, outer space research, and military operations. At present, there is little research on the control theory of flexible-link BT systems, and communication delay issues have not been considered. However, in practical terms, transmission delay in communication networks is a major problem in BT systems, and even small time delay often reduce system performance and lead to system instability. This paper takes the bilateral teleoperation system composed of master and slave flexible-link manipulators (MSFLM-BT) as the research object, and designs corresponding control scheme based on partial differential equation (PDE) dynamic model in the presence of communication delay, successfully achieving vibration suppression and angle coordination tracking of the system. The stability of the system is proven using the Lyapunov method, and under this control scheme, all closed-loop signals are bounded. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control scheme is verified through numerical simulation.