Bilateral Teleoperation of Wheeled Mobile Robots Subject to Lateral Sliding on Soft Terrains

With the widespread applications of wheeled mobile robots (WMR) in various fields, new challenges have arisen in terms of designing its control system. A special challenge is the soft terrain which can induce both of the longitudinal slipping and the lateral sliding. This paper proposes a new method for haptic teleoperation control of a WMR with lateral sliding. In this teleoperation system, the linear velocity and the angular velocity of the WMR separately follow the master haptic interface’s positions. Due to the functional benefits of displaying the lateral sliding information as haptic feedback to the operator, the lateral velocity is segregated and only perceived by the human operator. Then the teleoperator for the master robot and the slave WMR is designed based on the passivity theory. Experiments of the proposed controller demonstrate that this approach results in stable bilateral teleoperation with a satisfactory tracking performance.