Control of teleoperation systems operating under communication line failures

While the robots gradually become a part of our daily lives, they already play vital roles in many critical operations. Some of these critical tasks include surgeries, battlefield operations, and tasks that take place in hazardous environments or distant locations such as space missions. In most of these tasks, remotely controlled robots are used instead of autonomous robots. This special area of robotics is called teleoperation. Teleoperation systems must be reliable when used in critical tasks; hence, all of the subsystems must be dependable even under a subsystem or communication line failure. Teleoperation controllers are designed to compensate for instabilities due to communication time delays. Modifications to the existing controllers are proposed to configure a controller that is reliable under communication line failures. Experimental studies are then conducted on limited- and unlimited-workspace teleoperation systems to verify the efficiency of the controllers proposed for each system.