Kinematic Bilateral Teledriving of Wheeled Mobile Robots Coupled with Slippage

With the increasing applications of wheeled mobile robots (WMRs) in various fields, some new challenges have arisen on designing its teleoperation system. One of such challenges is caused by wheel's slippage. This paper proposes a new approach for haptic teledriving of a WMR coupled with slippage. In this teleoperation system, the WMR's linear velocity and angular velocity, respectively, follow the master haptic interface's positions. The proposed teleoperation controller also includes an acceleration-level control law for the WMR so that the WMR's linear and angular velocity loss induced by the slippage can be compensated for. Information caused by wheel's slippage in the environment termination (ET) is displayed to the human operator through haptic (force) feedback. After designing a local controller to compensate for the ET's nonpassivity caused by the slippage, the system's stability is shown via its passivity and it is also shown that the force felt by the human operator is approximately equal to the output force of the ET. Experiments of the proposed controller demonstrate that the modified ET is passive and the controller can result in stable bilateral teleoperation with a satisfactory tracking performance.