A Novel Energy Compensation Scheme for Quality Enhancement in Time-Delayed Teleoperation With Multi-DoF Haptic Data Reduction and Communication

Efficient and low-delay exchange of hapticinformation plays a key role for the design of high-fidelity teleoperation systems that operate over real-world communication networks. In the presence of communication unreliabilities such as delay and packet loss, a combination of stability-ensuring control schemes and haptic data reduction approaches is essential to address the challenges from both the control and communication perspective. In this paper, we extend our previous one degree-of-freedom (DoF) solution to 3DoF that combines the time-domain passivity approach (TDPA) and the perceptual deadband-based (DB) haptic data reduction approach. We also extend the 1DoF energy compensation (EC) scheme to 3DoF for mitigating the control artifacts introduced by the inter-play of the TDPA and DB approaches. The 3DoF solution is analyzed in detail and verified through a real-world teleoperation setup. The performance of the proposed method and the existing solutions is compared though objective and subjective assessments. Experimental results show that by jointly considering the evaluated objective/subjective quality and the required packet rate, the proposed 3DoF solution with the EC scheme improves system performance significantly compared to the state-of-the-art solutions.

Automated summary

Efficient and low-delay exchange of haptic information is crucial for high-fidelity teleoperation systems over real-world communication networks. A combination of stability-ensuring control schemes and haptic data reduction approaches is essential in the presence of communication unreliabilities. The proposed 3DoF solution with the EC scheme significantly improves system performance compared to existing solutions, as shown through objective and subjective assessments in real-world teleoperation setups.