Quantitative Evaluation of Streaming Image Quality for Robot Teleoperations

To develop a measure of streaming video quality for remotely operated robots, we need to know the critical factors for the quality of control. Controlling robots remotely is crucial for disaster response, and many attempts have been made to create such systems. Wireless communication, which is used in remote-control systems for unmanned vehicles, changes dynamically and the streaming quality also changes with the quality of the network. However, wireless conditions are not typically measured in conventional robot systems. In this paper, to develop a quality measure for remote control using video properties, we investigate critical factors such as delay and the degradation of image quality. We also introduce the concept of a quality-of-control measure using delay and degradation of image-quality curves from simulation environments, and we discuss the impacts of changing communication delay and degrading image quality on remote-control robots.