Time-delay compensation by communication disturbance observer for bilateral teleoperation under time-varying delay

This paper presents the effectiveness of a time-delay compensation method based on the concept of network disturbance and communication disturbance observer for bilateral teleoperation systems under time-varying delay. The most efficient feature of the compensation method is that it works without time-delay models (model-based time-delay compensation approaches like Smith predictor usually need time-delay models). Therefore, the method is expected to be widely applied to network-based control systems, in which time delay is usually unknown and time varying. In this paper, the validity of the time-delay compensation method in the cases of both constant delay and time-varying delay is verified by experimental results compared with Smith predictor.