Zexin Deng

Zexin Deng, Zhenhui Yuan, Tian Lu et al.

Real-time video streaming is crucial in surgical teleoperation, yet reproducible evaluation under realistic network impairments remains limited. This paper presents VISTA, a benchmark designed to study how impairments along the forward video path affect received video quality, temporal continuity, and human task performance. VISTA employs Linux Traffic Control with NetEm and a Gilbert-Elliott loss model to emulate five network conditions: Hospital LAN, 5G Urban, 4G Rural, LEO Satellite, and GEO Satellite. The benchmark integrates a standardised peg transfer task with synchronized measurements of network quality of service (QoS), objective video quality (PSNR, SSIM, and VMAF), and temporal continuity through freeze rate, while maintaining a stable reverse control channel. Across 375 experimental trials, network degradation substantially reduced teleoperation performance: success rate decreased from 97% in Hospital LAN to 79% in 5G Urban, 35% in 4G Rural, 71% in LEO Satellite, and 12% in GEO Satellite, while mean task completion time for successful trials increased from 80 s in Hospital LAN to 117 s in 5G Urban, 211 s in 4G Rural, 152 s in LEO Satellite, and 255 s in GEO Satellite. These findings show that network impairments have a direct impact on task completion and success in surgical teleoperation, and provide a reproducible basis for evaluating teleoperation video under realistic network constraints. Source code available at https://github.com/Dzxx623/VISTA.

Zexin Deng, Zhenhui Yuan, Longhao Zou

Telerobotic technologies are becoming increasingly essential in fields such as remote surgery, nuclear decommissioning, and space exploration. Reliable datasets and testbeds are essential for evaluating telerobotic system performance prior to real-world deployment. However, there is a notable lack of datasets that capture the impact of network delays, as well as testbeds that realistically model the communication link between the operator and the robot. This paper introduces TeleSim, a network-aware teleoperation dataset and testbed designed to assess the performance of telerobotic applications under diverse network conditions. TeleSim systematically collects performance data from fine manipulation tasks executed under three predefined network quality tiers: High, Medium, and Low. Each tier is characterized through controlled settings of bandwidth, latency, jitter, and packet loss. Using OMNeT++ for precise network simulation, we record a wide range of metrics, including completion time, success rates, video quality indicators (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) and Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM)), and quality of service (QoS) parameters. TeleSim comprises 300 experimental trials, providing a robust benchmark for evaluating teleoperation systems across heterogeneous network scenarios. In the worst network condition, completion time increases by 221.8% and success rate drops by 64%. Our findings reveal that network degradation leads to compounding negative impacts, notably reduced video quality and prolonged task execution, highlighting the need for adaptive, resilient teleoperation protocols. The full dataset and testbed software are publicly available on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/ConnectedRoboticsLab and YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/Fz_1iOYe104.