The aim of this thesis is to investigate the development and control of electro-pneumatic actuators in a haptic teleoperation system. For controlling the mass flow rate of such actuators, two types of valve technology are sudied, i.e. solenoid (on/off) valve and proportional servovalve. The servovalves have found widespread applications in which high accuracy of force/position control are needed. They are however typically expensive due to the requirements of high-precision manufacturing. Therefore, the low-cost solenoid valves can be an alternative to the servovalves for achieving acceptable-performance pneumatic control. Generally, the highly nonlinear of the pneumatic actuator is heightened when it uses on/off solenoid valves instead of servovalves. In this case, precise control is challenging due to the discrete-input nature of the system. Our first objective is to demonstrate that it is possible to design an acceptable performance teleoperation system using master-slave robots that have pneumatic actuators equipped with only inexpensive on/off solenoid valves. To control efficiently the switching valves, several control approaches have been proposed, namely pulse width modulation (PWM), hybrid algorithm, and sliding mode control. A hybrid control theory, which includes more switching control modes, than PWM, allows to reduce the chattering problem and improve the energy consumption of the valves. Another strategy (i.e. a sliding mode control), which does not depend on the pneumatic model, is proposed. This control stratgy allows to perform not only the transparent analysis but also the stability analysis. In order to improve the dynamic performance and reduce the chattering problem in solenoid valve actuated pneumatic teleoperation systems, a five-mode sliding control scheme has been used, which can be considered as an extension of the three-mode sliding controller. Our study demonstrates that by increasing the number of possible control actions for the valves, we can reduce the valves' switching activities, hence improving the valve's life times at no cost to teleoperation transparency. The second objective of the thesis involves in implementing the proportional servovalves on the pneumatic teleoperation system. A comparison related to the teleoperation performance between an on/off valve and a servovalve is carried out. In experiments, it is observed that with the bilateral teleoperation architecture employing solenoid valves or servovalves, satisfactory force and position tracking between the master and the slave is obtained. In bilateral teleoperation control, force sensors are often omitted to save cost and to lessen weight and volume. Therefore, another aspect of our work consists in using observers for an estimation of operator and environment forces. Experimental results show that acceptable teleoperation transparency based on a simple Nicosia observer and a tangent linear control approach can be achieved.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:CCSD/oai:tel.archives-ouvertes.fr:tel-00717743 |
| Date | 08 December 2011 |
| Creators | Le, Minh-Quyen |
| Publisher | INSA de Lyon |
| Source Sets | CCSD theses-EN-ligne, France |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | PhD thesis |
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