Toward QoE-Driven Dynamic Control Scheme Switching for Time-Delayed Teleoperation Systems: A Dedicated Case Study

TL;DR

This paper proposes a dynamic control scheme switching strategy for teleoperation systems to optimize user QoE under varying communication delays, validated through a dedicated case study with subjective testing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach for switching control schemes based on delay conditions to enhance QoE in time-delayed teleoperation systems.

Findings

The switching strategy improves QoE across different delay scenarios.

TDPA supports dynamic interactions but is delay-sensitive.

MMT tolerates larger delays but is less suitable for dynamic environments.

Abstract

Networked teleoperation with haptic feedback is a prime example for the emerging Tactile Internet, which requires a careful orchestration of haptic communication and control. One major challenge in this context is how to maximize the user's quality-of-experience (QoE) while ensuring at the same time the stability of the global control loop in the presence of communication delay. In this paper, we propose a dynamic control scheme switching strategy for teleoperation systems, which maximizes the QoE for time-varying communication delay. In order to validate the feasibility of the proposed approach, we perform a dedicated case study for a virtual teleoperation environment consisting of a one-dimensional spring-damper system, and conduct extensive subjective tests under various delay conditions for two control schemes: (1) teleoperation with the time-domain passivity approach (TDPA), which is highly delay-sensitive but supports highly dynamic interaction between the operator and a potentially quickly changing remote environment; (2) model-mediated teleoperation (MMT), which is tolerable to relatively larger communication delays, but unsuitable for quickly changing, highly dynamic remote environments. For both schemes, we use recently proposed extensions, which incorporate perceptual data reduction to reduce the required packet rate between the operator and the teleoperator. One key contribution of this paper lies in the exploration of the intrinsic relationship among QoE, communication delay and the control schemes which provides a fundamental guidance, not only to this research, but also to the future joint optimization of communication and control for time-delayed teleoperation systems.