Quality of Experience in Wireless Robotics

This book proposes a compensation mechanism for maintaining the quality of experience (QoE) when a user controls a ground vehicle over a wireless link affected by packet losses. This research is important because it applies to many relevant areas such as remote surgery, and search and rescue operations in human unfriendly environments. Previous research focused on quantifying network parameters, and using a delay tolerant network (DTN) approach to compensate for packet losses. This study proposes a different approach by using a heuristic based algorithm that tracks packet losses and then decides a course of action based on the current state of the system. Such a strategy helps reduce the mean time to complete tasks (TTCT) by approximately 16, 29, 36 and 90% when the link condition is in the good, medium, bad, and worst respectively. The system is successfully tested via a human-based experimental study by approximately 60 participants.