Integrating Haptic Data Reduction with Energy Reflection-Based Passivity Control for Time-delayed Teleoperation

This paper proposes a novel solution for teleoperation over communication networks in the presence of communication unreliabilities (e.g. delay, delay jitter, cross-traffic data streams). For teleoperation over a communication network, high packet rate and system stability are the two main issues. The former leads to inefficient data transmission and cross-traffic problems, resulting in additional delay and jitter, which aggravates the latter issue. In this paper, we first propose a novel joint solution which combines the state-of-the-art power-based time-domain passivity approach (TDPA) with the perceptual-deadband haptic data reduction approach to realize teleoperation over communication networks. Since this joint solution can lead to reduced energy output and poorer force tracking, we further propose an energy-based TDPA and a time-triggered update scheme to mitigate these artifacts and improve the overall system performance. Experimental results show that the proposed solution strongly reduces the packet rate and performs better than TDPA without data reduction, when adopted in a teleoperation system over a campus WiFi network. Compared with the previous work [1], our method is less conservative and has better force tracking capabilities.