Networked teleoperation with haptic feedback is a prime example for theemerging Tactile Internet, which requires a careful orchestration of hapticcommunication and control. One major challenge in this context is how tomaximize the user's quality-of-experience (QoE) while ensuring at the same timethe stability of the global control loop in the presence of communicationdelay. In this paper, we propose a dynamic control scheme switching strategyfor teleoperation systems, which maximizes the QoE for time-varyingcommunication delay. In order to validate the feasibility of the proposedapproach, we perform a dedicated case study for a virtual teleoperationenvironment consisting of a one-dimensional spring-damper system, and conductextensive subjective tests under various delay conditions for two controlschemes: (1) teleoperation with the time-domain passivity approach (TDPA),which is highly delay-sensitive but supports highly dynamic interaction betweenthe operator and a potentially quickly changing remote environment; (2)model-mediated teleoperation (MMT), which is tolerable to relatively largercommunication delays, but unsuitable for quickly changing, highly dynamicremote environments. For both schemes, we use recently proposed extensions,which incorporate perceptual data reduction to reduce the required packet ratebetween the operator and the teleoperator. One key contribution of this paperlies in the exploration of the intrinsic relationship among QoE, communicationdelay and the control schemes which provides a fundamental guidance, not onlyto this research, but also to the future joint optimization of communicationand control for time-delayed teleoperation systems.
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