Remote monitoring and control of the 2-DoF robotic manipulators over the internet

Abstract This article is concerned with remote monitoring and control of the 2-degrees of freedom (DoF) robotic manipulators, which have nonlinear dynamics over the packet erasure channel, which is an abstract model for communication over the Internet, WiFi, or Zigbee modules. This type of communication is subject to imperfections, such as random packet dropout and rate distortion. These imperfections cause a significant challenge for monitoring and control of robotic manipulators in the industrial environments because sensitive data, such as sensor data and control commands may not ever reach to their destination resulting in significant performance degradation. Therefore, the effects of these imperfections must be compensated. In this article, we apply two coding and control techniques previously developed for the telepresence ad teleoperation of autonomous vehicles to compensate the effects of the above communication imperfections for remote monitoring and control of the 2-DoF robotic manipulators controlled over the packet erasure channel. To achieve this goal, we design a new linear controller and a new nonlinear controller for the 2-DoF robotic manipulators over the packet erasure channel. The first technique is based on the linearization method and the second technique uses a nonlinear controller. The performances of these two techniques for remote monitoring and control of robotic manipulators are evaluated and compared with each other in this paper. We illustrate their satisfactory performances in the presence of severe communication imperfections.