Haptic data reduction for time-delayed teleoperation using the time domain passivity approach

We propose a perceptual haptic data reduction approach for teleoperation systems which use the time domain passivity approach (TDPA) as their control architecture for dealing with time-varying communication delay. Our goal is to reduce the packet rate over the communication network while preserving system stability in the presence of time-varying and unknown delays. Compared to the existing wave variable-based (WV-based) haptic data reduction approaches, our proposed scheme leads to smaller distortion in the force signals and robustly deals with time-varying delays. Experiments show that our proposed approach can reduce the average packet rate by up to 80%, without introducing significant distortion. In addition, the proposed approach outperforms the existing WV-based approaches in both packet rate reduction and subjective preference for the tested communication delays.