Performance measurement and prediction in a distributed telerobotics system

In developing telerobotics systems, it is desirable to be able to predict the effect of adding or replacing system components on the overall system's performance capacities. By appropriately stressing performance dimensions of a system and characterizing its behavior, we can develop a model that will describe the system quantitatively in terms of its total available "performance resources". If the resource availability is greater than or equal to the resource demands for a given task, we can predict successful completion for the task. Using this approach, we can characterize new intelligent components and predict their performance in a given task. Results of a teleoperation experiment are included which yield a system performance capacity envelope for a telerobotics system.