Wireless control of a teleoperated hydraulic manipulator with application towards live-line maintenance

This paper presents the procedure of establishing performance charts for effective utilization of a teleoperated hydraulic manipulator working under wireless communication channels. A teleoperated system, comprising a master haptic device and an industrial hydraulic manipulator, is constructed. The master and slave communicate through a communication channel emulated using the NS2 simulator. Two sets of experiments are designed to construct performance charts that guide us to select appropriate parameters of wireless network setup by which a particular value of position error appears at the slave hydraulic manipulator end-effector. The network parameters are: configuration of environment obstruction, transmission power of the router, and distance between the master and slave sites. The first set of experiments is conducted to define three regions of tracking quality, and to construct the performance charts. The second set of experiments confirms satisfactory performance, when the teleoperated system is located within the recommended regions in the established charts. One application of this study is live-line maintenance using remotely-operated hydraulic manipulators.