Toward QoE-Driven Dynamic Control Scheme Switching for Time-Delayed Teleoperation Systems: A Dedicated Case Study
This work addresses the problem of optimizing user experience and stability in networked teleoperation systems for applications like the Tactile Internet, though it is incremental as it builds on existing control schemes.
The paper tackles the challenge of maximizing user quality-of-experience (QoE) while ensuring stability in time-delayed teleoperation systems by proposing a dynamic control scheme switching strategy. It validates this approach through a case study with a one-dimensional spring-damper system, showing feasibility under various delay conditions.
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.