High-fidelity Teleoperation for Heavy-duty Vehicles

Teleoperation or remote operation is an important part of research in autonomous vehicles and robots. It serves as a useful backup option in case the autonomous system encounters any issue and human intervention is needed. In the case of heavy-duty vehicles for off-road applications, teleoperation is also a good alternative even without autonomy, as it can help improve the working conditions of the operators. In either case, teleoperation can be quite challenging due a number of factors such as network connectivity, lack of natural visual perspective and the inability of the remote operator to judge the vehicle's accelerations and movements. These challenges cause significant safety issues. We have developed a high-fidelity teleoperation system that is designed to overcome these challenges and make remote operation easy and natural. The prototypes have been developed and significantly tested during proof of concept trials with various types of vehicles to demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.