Adaptive bilateral teleoperation of an unknown object handled by multiple robots under unknown communication delay

Cooperative robotic systems have been widely studied recently. However, bilateral teleoperation of these systems is rarely considered. Here, an adaptive control algorithm for the single-master multi-slave robotic systems is studied. The slave robots cooperatively handle an object of unknown kinematic and dynamic uncertainties. The master and the slave manipulators also contain dynamic uncertainties. The dynamics of the cooperative system is obtained based on a measurable point of the object. The object's grasping forces are concealed in the derived dynamics and can be controlled independent of the motion space. The controlled system is robust against constant but unknown time delays in the communication channel. Although the environment is passive, the human operator could become active in the designed control algorithm. Asymptotic stability of the closed-loop tele-operator in guaranteed in free motion strategy. In addition, the uniformly ultimately boundedness of synchronization signals is verified on contact scenario. Hardware in the loop experiments explain the performance of the proposed control framework.