Contribucións á teleoperación pasiva. Aplicación a guindastre pórtico en entorno háptico

Resumo

This thesis deals with teleoperation, port-controlled hamiltonian systems, and haptics. These subjects have been intensively researched in the past two decades, especially from a control or systems engineering point of view. This thesis presents some contributions that facilitate the combined application of these techniques in an industrial context, using a gantry crane as a motivating example. The thesis' main results are two new methods for reducing the position error in bilateral teleoperation. The first one, which has been specifically designed for its use in internet-based teleoperation, makes use of an energy margin. The second one is the first published method to apply reset control techniques in teleoperation; its core idea is to reset the impedance controllers. Additionally, the plant selected as case study (a gantry crane) has been modelled as a port-hamiltonian system, and several ways of controlling it have been developed: by means of input-output linearization; using neural networks; with an H-infinity framework; by means of the IDA-PBC method; and with the control by interconnection paradigm. Finally, a hardware and software architecture for teleoperating a gantry crane using haptic devices and environments has been presented. Visual and tactile aids for the operator are devised, and included along with the previously developed controllers in the global setup. All the proposed techniques have been experimentally tested, and the results show improvements in performance and safety.