Negotiating Corners With Teleoperated Mobile Robots With Time Delay

In this paper, we present the summary of results from a teleoperation study to assess the application of a mobile robot cornering law with the inclusion of a time delay on the returned video stream. The intent is to demonstrate this application to an analogous scenario like teleoperating from Earth a rover at the south Lunar pole. The first experiment compared course completion times for outdoor driving circuits in ideal lighting without time delay, ideal lighting with time delay, and in darkness with time delay and a low-angled spotlight. The second experiment studied cornering times for various time delays and lighting conditions in an indoor setting. The results show that teleoperating a mobile robot with the presence of time delay still complies with the previously developed cornering law. The combined results from the cornering study and the outdoor driving course are interpreted to show that the total time to complete a driving course with a time-delayed video can be predicted based on a known number of turns.