Towards deadband control in networked teleoperation systems

One of the key challenges in current bilateral teleoperation systems is the high data packet rate, necessary for the transmission of the sampled command and sensor data. in this paper a novel, psychophysically motivated approach to reduce the packet rate based on a deadband approach is proposed. Data packets are only sent if the sampled signal changes more than a given threshold, which is adjusted to match the "just noticeable difference" in human haptic perception. On the receiver side, untransmitted data is reconstructed by a passified "hold last sample" algorithm that guarantees the stability of the teleoperation system. Psychophysical experiments validate that the proposed approach leads to a considerable reduction (up to 85%) of the packet rate without sacrificing the human haptic perception of the remote environment.