High Speed Teleoperation with Variable Latency

Teleoperation of high speed ground robots is very difficult. People use an enormous amount of proprioceptive cues to estimate safe travel speeds and compensate for motion jitter. Simply moving the controls off-board takes away those cues, and makes the task much harder. Worse, the reality of radio links dictates that latency will appear between the time at which a movement is commanded and the time when the video display reflects the resulting vehicle motion. To solve this problem, MIC will apply two complementary techniques to improve the vehicle safety and operator experience of high-speed teleoperation with variable latency. First, we will develop a horse-like semi-autonomy system to change the experience of teleoperating a high speed robot from requiring constant control into something akin to driving a horse and buggy. Second, an enhanced display pre-processing system will synthesize missing images during periods of packet loss or high latency by projecting the vehicles movement and warping the last image to create the missing frame, and stabilize the images to remove high-frequency motion. These processes will be combined into a Supervised Autonomous Mobility Control (SAM-C) software subsystem hosted on a JAUS compliant computing device meeting Army standards for robotic systems.