Equating user performance among communication latency distributions and simulation fidelities for a teleoperated mobile robot

This paper explores the impact of communication latency (time delay) on path following for a teleoperated mobile robot. In [1] Vozar developed a human steering model capturing the effects of latency on teleoperated driving performance and introduced the idea of equating path following performances under variable latency to an equivalent constant latency. We repeat Vozar´s user experiments on a higher fidelity (dynamic) simulation using different latency distributions. Two key findings are presented. First, user tests support a relationship between path following scores for latency distributions of different shapes. Second, our user tests with the dynamic simulation produced the same trend describing latency´s impact on performance as Vozar´s results with a kinematic simulation.