A Brief Survey of Telerobotic Time Delay Mitigation

Abstract

There is a substantial number of telerobotics and teleoperation applications ranging from space operations, ground/aerial robotics, drive-by-wire systems to medical interventions. Major obstacles for such applications include latency, channel corruptions, and bandwidth which limit teleoperation efficacy. This survey reviews the time delay problem in teleoperation systems. We briefly review different solutions from early approaches which consist of control-theory-based models and user interface designs and focus on newer approaches developed since 2014. Future solutions to the time delay problem will likely be hybrid solutions which include modeling of user intent, prediction of robot movements, and time delay prediction all potentially using time series prediction methods. Hence, we examine methods that are primarily based on time series prediction. Recent prediction approaches take advantage of advances in nonlinear statistical models as well as machine learning and neural network techniques. We review Recurrent Neural Networks, Long Short-Term Memory, Sequence to Sequence, and Generative Adversarial Network models and examine each of these approaches for addressing time delay. As time delay is still an unsolved problem, we suggest some possible future research directions from information-theory-based modeling, which may lead to promising new approaches to advancing the field.

Keywords: Long Short-Term Memory; Robotics; Sequence to sequence model; machine learning; recurrent neural network; teleoperation; telesurgery; time series prediction.