A novel, psychophysically motivated transmission approach for haptic data streams in telepresence and teleaction systems

One of the key challenges in telepresence and teleaction systems is the fact that a global control loop is closed over a communication network. The transmission delay of haptic information is extremely critical. Therefore, new data samples from the haptic sensors are typically immediately forwarded to the receiver which leads to a large number of packets being generated when using the Internet as the communication infrastructure. We present a novel approach to reduce the number of packets and, therefore, the amount data communicated in a telepresence and teleaction system. Our method uses a passive deadband transmission approach which only delivers data packets over the network when the sampled sensor data changes more than a given threshold value. The threshold value is determined by psychophysical experiments. This approach leads to a considerable reduction (up to 90%) of packet rate and data rate without sacrificing the fidelity and immersiveness of the system.