Simon Hoffmann

Andreas Schimpe, Johannes Feiler, Simon Hoffmann et al.

Teleoperation allows a human operator to remotely interact with and control a mobile robot in a dangerous or inaccessible area. Besides well-known applications such as space exploration or search and rescue operations, the application of teleoperation in the area of automated driving, i.e., teleoperated driving (ToD), is becoming more popular. Instead of an in-vehicle human fallback driver, a remote operator can connect to the vehicle using cellular networks and resolve situations that are beyond the automated vehicle (AV)'s operational design domain. Teleoperation of AVs, and unmanned ground vehicles in general, introduces different problems, which are the focus of ongoing research. This paper presents an open source ToD software stack, which was developed for the purpose of carrying out this research. As shown in three demonstrations, the software stack can be deployed with minor overheads to control various vehicle systems remotely.

Andreas Schimpe, Simon Hoffmann, Frank Diermeyer

Vehicles with autonomous driving capabilities are present on public streets. However, edge cases remain that still require a human in-vehicle driver. Assuming the vehicle manages to come to a safe state in an automated fashion, teleoperated driving technology enables a human to resolve the situation remotely by a control interface connected via a mobile network. While this is a promising solution, it also introduces technical challenges, one of them being the necessity to transmit video data of multiple cameras from the vehicle to the human operator. In this paper, an adaptive video streaming framework specifically designed for teleoperated vehicles is proposed and demonstrated. The framework enables automatic reconfiguration of the video streams of the multi-camera system at runtime. Predictions of variable transmission service quality are taken into account. With the objective to improve visual quality, the framework uses so-called rate-quality models to dynamically allocate bitrates and select resolution scaling factors. Results from deploying the proposed framework on an actual teleoperated driving system are presented.