Power-based restoration of haptic teleoperation from communication blackout

Recently, network-based control systems attract a lot of attentions. One of the applications of such control systems is haptic transmission using a bilateral control system. In order to construct the bilateral control system over the time delayed-network, many researchers have proposed many methods and succeeded to improve the stability and performance of the system. By assuring the system's passivity, some of conventional methods have succeeded to stabilize the system even when the communication blackout occurs. However, the passivity-based methods are conservative and deteriorate the performance. In this paper, the mode shifting method is proposed to deal with the communication blackout without considering the system's passivity. In the proposed method, the bilateral controller is shifted to a local controller when the communication blackout occurs. By shifting to the local controller, the system is not destabilized by the blackout. Moreover, when the communication recovers, the bilateral controller is gradually restored to regulate the robot's output power. Owing to the power regulation, the robots never damage environmental objects during and after the communication blackout. Therefore, the proposed method realizes stable and safe control even under the blackout. The validity of the proposed method is confirmed by simulations and a experiment.