  This paper presents a globally stable teleoperation control strategy for
systems with time-varying delays that eliminates the need for velocity
measurements through novel augmented Immersion and Invariance velocity
observers. The new observers simplify a recent constructive Immersion and
Invariance velocity observer to achieve globally convergent velocity estimation
with only $n+2$ states, where $n$ is the number of degrees of freedom of the
master and slave robots. They introduce dynamic scaling factors to accelerate
the speed of convergence of the velocity estimates and, thus, to limit the
energy generated by the velocity estimation errors and to guarantee sufficient
estimate-based damping injection to dissipate the energy generated by the
time-varying delays. The paper shows that Proportional plus damping control
with the simplified and augmented Immersion and Invariance-based velocity
observers can synchronize the free master and slave motions in the presence of
time-varying delays without using velocity measurements. Numerical results
illustrate the estimation performance of the new observers and the stability of
a simulated two degrees-of-freedom nonlinear teleoperation system with
time-varying delays under the proposed output feedback Proportional plus
damping control.
