An Adaptive Proportional Plus Damping Control for Teleoperation Systems with Asymmetric Time-Varying Communication Delays

Communication delay is an important factor affecting the stability and performance of telerobotic systems. In this paper, a new adaptive proportional damping controller is proposed to improve the stability and performance of the system in the presence of the cases such as asymmetric communication delay, unknown gravity torque, friction torque, and other disturbance torques. The proposed proportional damping control method combines the RBF neural network and adaptive control strategy to compensate for the unknown torque. The stability and robustness of the system are enhanced by adding error-damping items, operator force, and environmental force items. The Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional is employed to analyze and prove the exponential stability and signal boundedness of the closed-loop system. The simulation results verify the correctness of the proposed method, and the comparison with the results of other control methods shows the effectiveness of the designed control strategy.