Fundamental Rules of Teleoperated Driving with Network Latency on Curvy Roads

In this paper, we demonstrate how the network latency, the longitudinal velocity and the path curvature affect performance of the teleoperated driving (ToD). The performance of a ToD system is studied analytically through stability analysis of a dimensionless vehicle dynamics model with a scaled delay, which integrates the end-to-end (E2E) latency and the longitudinal velocity of the vehicle. We also establish a numerical simulation framework for ToD while incorporating a stochastic latency in the control loop arising from vehicle-to-network-to-vehicle (V2N2V) communication through a wireless network. The stochasticity of the latency mostly comes from the network scalability challenges to support high video bitrates, which also leads to packet drops. We provide simulation results of teleoperating a vehicle in a realistic parking lot scenario and demonstrate the effects of speed, curvature and stochastic latency on the maneuver performance.