Effect of Video Quality and Buffering Delay on Telemanipulation Performance.

There is much current research into telemanipulation which deals with time delays introduced by the communication channel. However, surprisingly little research has been carried out into how varying delay and quality in solely the video stream affects teleoperation task performance. In this paper the parameters of a) buffering delay and b) video quality (encoding bitrate) are tested to examine their effect on time to task completion and accuracy of a mock welding task with an industrial telemanipulator. From these relationships, several key parameter values arise which can aid engineers when designing video streaming systems for telemanipulation.