Contact prediction control for a teleoperation system with time delay

In a teleoperation system with communication delay, the contact information on the slave side is transmitted to the master side with time delay. Hence, an operator may misunderstand that the slave has not contacted an object and may add more force. Eventually, excessive force by the slave may collapse the object. This paper proposes model predictive control with a variable dumping method to prevent collision on contact in a teleoperation system with time delay. The prediction method considers the distance to the object on slave side, and variable dumping is implemented on the master side. The proposed method is evaluated through numerical simulations and experiments.