Fault-tolerant Teleoperation Systems Design: Employment of Fault Tolerance Features and Virtual Rapid Robot Prototyping in Teleoperation Systems Design

While the robots gradually become a part of our daily lives, they already play vital roles in many critical operations. Some of these critical tasks include surgeries, battlefield operations, and tasks that take place in hazardous environments or distant locations such as space missions. In most of these tasks, remotely controlled robots are used instead of autonomous robots. This area of robotics is called teleoperation. Teleoperation systems must be reliable when used in critical tasks even under a subsystem or communication line failure. Teleoperation controllers are presented to compensate for instabilities due to communication line failures. Fault-tolerant design and modeling of the master and slave systems are also addressed at different levels to prevent subsystem failure. Virtual Rapid Robot Prototyping, is introduced to create system models rapidly and accurately. Teleoperation systems configured in this book are then tested both in numerical simulations and experiments. Overall, by employing the fault-tolerance features and the proposed controllers, teleoperation designers can configure more reliable systems for a wider range of critical missions.