David J. Gorsich, Paramsothy Jayakumar, Michael P. Cole, Cory M. Crean, Abhinandan Jain, Tulga Ersal
Journal of Terramechanics, Volume 80, 2018, Pages 11-19, ISSN 0022-489
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jterra.2018.10.001.(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022489818300971)
Abstract: As the penetration levels of unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) in military applications increase, there is a growing need to evaluate their mobility across different latencies and various modes of operation ranging from pure teleoperation to full autonomy. State-of-the-art tools to evaluate mobility of ground vehicles do not address this need due to their not accounting for UGV technologies and the associated latencies. Although the trade-off between latency and performance has been thoroughly studied in the telerobotics literature and the results may qualitatively shed light onto the UGV domain, as well, a quantitative generalization is not possible due to the differences in context. Recognizing this gap, this paper presents a functional relationship between mobility and latency in high-speed, teleoperated UGVs under the context of path following. Specifically, data from human-in-the-loop simulations performed in this paper are combined with data from prior studies to span three vehicle types, three courses, and teleoperation latencies ranging from 0 s to 1 s. This combination yields for the first time a diverse data set for the context of path following in high speed, teleoperated UGVs. Based on this data set, empirical relationships are derived to quantify the trade-off between latency versus average speed and lane keeping error. These relationships can be used to establish a benchmark to evaluate the performance of autonomy-enabled UGV systems.
Keywords: Mobility; Latency; Unmanned ground vehicles; Teleoperation