Safety-Guaranteed Adaptive Control of Teleoperation Systems Under Event-Triggered Mechanisms

This brief addresses the problem of safety-critical control for teleoperation systems with unknown dynamics, time delays, and event-triggered mechanisms. The goal is to ensure that the slave robot stays safe in an unknown environment while guaranteeing master–slave synchronization. We first define virtual reference systems that serve as generators of the desired trajectories and then propose control barrier functions (CBFs) to ensure safety requirements for the virtual reference system. The safety-critical control problem for the slave is formulated as a quadratic program (QP). To save computational resources and improve efficiency, we propose event-triggered mechanisms to determine when to solve the QP and update the controllers. Stability analysis shows that the closed-loop system is stable while achieving master–slave synchronization. It is also proven that the proposed framework ensures the safety of the system. Simulation and experimental results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.