Passive bilateral teleoperation of a car-like mobile robot

This paper addresses the bilateral teleoperation of a car-like planetary rover under communication delay. The teleoperation platform is built up between the rover and a haptic device, which provides the human operator a force-feedback mechanism describing the environmental conditions, based on the relative distances and speeds between the rover and the obstacles. Therefore, obstacle avoidance can be achieved independent of the visualization of the environment, which, on the other hand, will reduce the communication burden. We propose to use two control methods, which are based on different driving principles. A virtual-mass model extended to the application on a car-like rover is introduced, so that wave-variable method can be implemented on this teleoperation system to overcome the time-delay problem. This control strategy is compared with the sliding-mode based impedance control through a set of experiments, which also prove the feasibility of both teleoperation schemes.