Adaptive finite-time control for bilateral teleoperation systems with jittering time delays

In this paper, we present a robust adaptive control algorithm for a class of bilateral teleoperation systems with system uncertainties and jittering time delays. The remarkable feature of jittering delays is that time delays change sharply and randomly. Conventional controllers would fail because jittering time delays introduce serious chattering. To address the jittering issue, a novel jittering-free scheme is developed by relaxing and extending the frequently used constant upper bound. Moreover, an adaptive law was incorporated with the Chebyshev neural network to deal with the system uncertainties. To obtain finite-time synchronization performance, a fast terminal sliding mode controller is proposed through the technique of adding a power integrator. With the proposed control scheme, the robust finite-time convergence performance is guaranteed. The settling time can be further calculated with the controller parameters. The simulation and experiment results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method.