Output Synchronization for Teleoperation of Wheel Mobile Robot

The potential for use of robotic systems in remote applications arenas has long motivated development of robust and stable means of teleoperated control of slave systems. However, telerobotic systems face challenges stemming from the devices themselves, environmental factors, communication and control complexities. To address these challenges, we will adopt the passivity based synchronization framework [1] and study its applicability to safely synchronize two heterogeneous Lagrangian systems. Within this framework, an adaptive controller identifies and stabilizes the dynamics of the master and slave systems and renders the dynamics passive to a secondary coupling input. The passive mapping used to couple the output states of the master and slave systems and is made insensitive to lossy and delayed communication medium. Specifically, an adaptive passive synchronization teleoperation controller is developed between an Omni haptic device that serves as our master and a differentially driven nonholonomic Wheel Mobile Robot (WMR) as the slave system. A battery of hardware-in-the-loop simulations are used to verify the proposed controller.