Generalized predictive control for space teleoperation systems with long time-varying delays

Prior researches of generalized predictive control (GPC) in teleoperation systems have mainly considered short transmitted time delays or single degree of freedom (DOF) manipulators of master and slave. This paper presents a GPC strategy for space teleoperation systems in which the master and slave manipulators are both multi-DOF and the communication network brings long time-varying delays. The nonlinear dynamics of the multi-DOF slave manipulator is linearized and described by a linear state-space equation. Meanwhile, a nonlinear compensator is used to compensate the nonlinear parts of the slave. Then, based on the equation, a state-space model based GPC controller is designed on the master side to stabilize the system and make the slave manipulator track the master position and velocity no matter whether the manipulator contacts with the environment or not. Finally, a simulation example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.