Swingback Suppression for a Time Delayed Teleoperation System with MPC

In this paper, we propose a method to stabilize a teleoperation system with large communication delays using model predictive control (MPC). The proposed scheme includes compensation for the large delay by introducing an operator-driven reference model that generaters target values. Communication delay is compensated by using the reference-model output as a target value, and the reference trajectory is generated from early-arriving data. For teleoperation systems with large communication delays, MPC can enhance the tracking performance of the reference model; however, model errors and disturbances can introduce swingback phenomenon and instability. To address this issue, we propose a swingback suppression method. This involves adding the rate of change of the reference model to the reference trajectory and including the rate of change of the augmented plant state. In the proposed method, a terminal cost is also introduced to stabilize the augmented system that includes communication delay. Simulation and experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.