Teleoperation in the Presence of Communication Delays

Modern industrial processes, public service needs, and research interests have established a clear need to perform work remotely [12][4]. Teleoperators were developed with the advent of nuclear industry in the mid 1940's and have been since used extensively to perform work in hazardous environments (nuclear, chemical), undersea (resource exploration, waste management, pollution monitoring), and in the outer space (sample acquisition, satellite deployment/repair). Sophisticated systems have been designed and built to meet these needs, providing the human operator with high bandwidth and high fidelity visual and kinesthetic feedback information about the task in progress [22] [32] [16] [6].