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 in their visual cortex. 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. While driving, especially in urban areas, the quality of radio data links can vary tremendously which causes changes in the latency and potential dropouts exceeding a couple seconds. Variable latency quickly becomes irritating and dramatically reduces controllability of the platform, and loss of operator control for longer than a fraction of a second is a serious hazard. To solve this problem, MIC will apply three complementary techniques to improve the vehicle safety and operator experience of high-speed teleoperation with variable latency.