A Bilateral Teleoperation Architecture using Smith Predictor and Adaptive Network Buffering

Teleoperation is an important technology in many high risk and challenging applications. However model uncertainty and unknown and time-varying communication delay can make the system unstable or badly affects its usability if not properly managed. In this paper we exploit the well-known Smith predictor to improve the performance. To take advantages of the Smith predictor, we have to guarantee that the round-trip time of the bilateral teleoperation system is constant and known. To reach this goal we introduce adaptive buffers at the master and slave side to compensate for the delay jitter, to estimate lost packets and to filter out the noise; at the same time the adaptation mechanism allows to change the size of the buffers to use the smallest size according to the actual network conditions. Experimental results on a one-degree of freedom teleoperated system show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.