PARSIMONIOUS DATA TRANSMISSION IN HAPTIC TELEPRESENCE SYSTEMS

Limited communication resources represent a major challen ge in networked telepresence and teleaction systems. Video an d audio compression schemes are well advanced employing models of human perception. In contrast to that haptic data reduction schemes are rather poorly treated in the known literature. This paper introduces a novel approach to reduce network traffic in haptic telepresence systems exploiting l imits in human haptic perception. With the proposed deadband control approach data packets are transmitted only if the si gnal change exceeds a signal amplitude dependent perception threshold. Experimental user studies show that a network tr affic reduction of up to 85 % can be achieved without impairing the perception of the remote environment. This study is performed under the assumption of a data transmission with zero communication delay.