A Special-Purpose Video Streaming Codec for Internet-based Remote Driving

Real-time teleoperation of robotic systems over the Internet is a desirable technology in many ways. Latency of the video feedback has been hampering its development. This paper takes the application of remote driving to introduce an unconventional codec that provides a very low latency for Internet-based video streaming. The proposed method preserves just enough information in the video for essential perception and decision making of a remote driver. Thanks to a unique integration of several image processing and data streaming techniques, the proposed codec can realize a glass-to-glass latency of around 90 ms. A series of tests are conducted over the real consumer Internet to analyze the latency and verify the effectiveness of remote driving with the proposed codec.