Toward QoE-driven dynamic control scheme switching for time-delayed teleoperation systems: A dedicated case Study

Abstract

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.

A Comprehensive Survey of the Tactile Internet: State-of-the-Art and Research Directions

“…Only a few studies have taken a co-design approach in the context of the Tactile Internet. Xu et al [161], Liu et al [162] and Chang et al [163] focus on the co-design of communication and control schemes for Tactile Internet applications. Ashraf et al [164] investigate the joint design of energy management and data rate control for energy harvesting-enabled tactile IoT nodes.…”

“…The lesson we can learn from this insight is that more research efforts are needed on mobility management while allocating resources at the edge for the Tactile Internet. Among our surveyed papers, advanced co-design solutions that address the Tactile Internet challenges (i.e., [161]) rely on the use of data reduction techniques (e.g., perceptual coding) in conjunction with different stability-ensuring control schemes (e.g., TPDA or MMT) in the presence of end-to-end latency between the human operator and telerobot. Further, it has been shown in [161], [162], and [163] that each control scheme is associated with a certain amount of delay tolerance, so that the selection of the proper control scheme for a given end-to-end delay may be as effective as reducing the latency itself.…”

“…Among our surveyed papers, advanced co-design solutions that address the Tactile Internet challenges (i.e., [161]) rely on the use of data reduction techniques (e.g., perceptual coding) in conjunction with different stability-ensuring control schemes (e.g., TPDA or MMT) in the presence of end-to-end latency between the human operator and telerobot. Further, it has been shown in [161], [162], and [163] that each control scheme is associated with a certain amount of delay tolerance, so that the selection of the proper control scheme for a given end-to-end delay may be as effective as reducing the latency itself. Another insight is that communication delay and packet loss can be modeled into the underlying control system via a communication-control co-design, where the communication energy consumption is reduced using dynamic QoS allocation throughout the control process [163].…”

Toward Tactile Internet in Beyond 5G Era: Recent Advances, Current Issues, and Future Directions

“…To address this, one of the potential solutions could be the reservation of some bandwidth for latency-sensitive users so that they can immediately transmit their data as soon as they have some data to transmit. Although such a bandwidth reservation method has been used in voice over Internet services having known and fixed transmit rate, the traffic pattern in TI applications is very bursty and irregular in nature [185] and this requires efficient bandwidth reservation techniques.…”

Analysis of Uplink Scheduling for Haptic Communications

“…To model the effect of UL scheduling mechanism used for haptic communications, as a case of URLLC, on the leftover service and delay, firstly, we need to consider a model for haptic traffic packet arrivals. Based on experiments in [13], we consider periodic bursty traffic for haptic data as depicted in Figure 3. Bursts arrive with period of T p , their duration is T b , and the inter arrival time during the burst period is T ib .…”