A Delay Compensation Framework Based on Eye-Movement for Teleoperated Ground Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper introduces an eye-movement-based trajectory guidance control system to improve teleoperated ground vehicle maneuverability under communication delays, by predicting human intent and guiding the vehicle accordingly.

Contribution

It presents a novel delay compensation framework that uses eye-movement data to generate guidance trajectories, reducing delay sensitivity in teleoperation systems.

Findings

Significantly improves maneuverability at delays over 200 ms

Reduces cognitive burden on teleoperators

Outperforms existing PTGC method without eye-movement features

Abstract

An eye-movement-based predicted trajectory guidance control (ePTGC) is proposed to mitigate the maneuverability degradation of a teleoperated ground vehicle caused by communication delays. Human sensitivity to delays is the main reason for the performance degradation of a ground vehicle teleoperation system. The proposed framework extracts human intention from eye-movement. Then, it combines it with contextual constraints to generate an intention-compliant guidance trajectory, which is then employed to control the vehicle directly. The advantage of this approach is that the teleoperator is removed from the direct control loop by using the generated trajectories to guide vehicle, thus reducing the adverse sensitivity to delay. The delay can be compensated as long as the prediction horizon exceeds the delay. A human-in-loop simulation platform is designed to evaluate the teleoperation performance of the proposed method at different delay levels. The results are analyzed by repeated measures ANOVA, which shows that the proposed method significantly improves maneuverability and cognitive burden at large delay levels (>200 ms). The overall performance is also much better than the PTGC which does not employ the eye-movement feature.