Predicted Trajectory Guidance Control Framework of Teleoperated Ground Vehicles Compensating for Delays

A predicted trajectory guidance control (PTGC) framework is proposed to deal with the degradation of maneuverability and drivability of a teleoperated ground vehicle caused by large communication delays. Humans dominate the control of the teleoperated ground vehicle, and human sensitivity to delays is the main reason for control performance degradation. To address this problem, the proposed framework predicts the teleoperator's intended trajectory using the control commands and the 3D point cloud of the environment at the vehicle side, which is then used to guide the vehicle directly. The novelty of the approach is to attenuate the sensitivity of the human-in-loop system to delays by removing the teleoperator from the direct control loop. Delays can be compensated as long as the predicted horizon exceeds the delays. Human-in-loop simulation experiments are designed to evaluate the teleoperation performance of the proposed method at various delay levels. By means of repeated measurement analysis of variance, it is concluded that the proposed method can significantly improve maneuverability and drivability metrics at large delays(>200ms), such as the task completion time, deviation to centerline and steering efforts. In addition, the results also show that since teleoperators can adapt well to small delays (<= 200 ms), the presented method is ineffective in this case.