Predicted Trajectory Guidance Control Framework of Teleoperated Ground Vehicles Compensating for Delays

TL;DR

This paper introduces a predicted trajectory guidance control framework for teleoperated ground vehicles that compensates for communication delays by predicting the operator's intended trajectory using environmental data and historical commands, significantly improving performance under large delays.

Contribution

The novel PTGC framework predicts teleoperator trajectories at the vehicle side, reducing delay sensitivity and enhancing teleoperation performance in delayed communication scenarios.

Findings

Significant improvement in task completion time under delays >200ms

Reduction in deviation to centerline and steering effort with PTGC

Method less effective for smaller delays

Abstract

Maneuverability and drivability of the teleoperated ground vehicle could be seriously degraded by large communication delays if the delays are not properly compensated. This paper proposes a predicted trajectory guidance control (PTGC) framework to compensate for such delays, thereby improving the performance of the teleoperation system. The novelty of this PTGC framework is that teleoperators intended trajectory is predicted at the vehicle side with their delayed historical control commands and the LiDAR 3D point cloud of the environment, and then the vehicle is guided by the predicted trajectory. By removing the teleoperator from the direct control loop, the presented method is less sensitive to delays, and delays are compensated as long as the prediction horizon exceeds the delays. Human-in-the-loop simulation experiments are designed to evaluate the teleoperation performance with the proposed method under five delay levels. Based on the repeated measurement analysis of variance, it is concluded that the PTGC method can significantly improve the performance of the teleoperated ground vehicles under large delays(>200ms), such as the task completion time (TCT), deviation to centerline (D2C) and steering effort (SE). In addition, the results also show that teleoperators can adapt to smaller delays, and the presented method is ineffective in such cases.