Network-aware Shared Autonomy in Bilateral Teleoperation

In this paper, an autonomy allocation approach is proposed for bilateral teleoperation systems to improve user performance under suboptimal communication networks. To achieve this, time-varying communication quality metrics such as delay and jitter are continuously monitored on the teleoperated side, and the autonomy level is dynamically adjusted based on the communication network quality. An autonomous agent is also deployed on the teleoperated side, leveraging preexisting task knowledge for shared autonomy. Additionally, a time-domain passivity approach is employed to maintain communication channel passivity, mitigating the impact of adverse network behavior on task performance. The proposed approach is validated through extensive experiments and user studies, and the result shows our approach significantly improved the performance of the subjects (p< 0.01).