A Visual-Haptic Multiplexing Scheme for Teleoperation Over Constant-Bitrate Communication Links

We propose a novel multiplexing scheme for teleoperation over constant bitrate (CBR) communication links. The proposed approach uniformly divides the channel into 1ms resource buckets and controls the size of the transmitted video packets as a function of the irregular haptic transmission events generated by a perceptual haptic data reduction approach. The performance of the proposed multiplexing scheme is measured objectively in terms of delay-jitter and packet rates. The results show that acceptable multiplexing delays on both the visual and haptic streams are achieved. Our evaluation shows that the proposed approach can provide a guaranteed constant delay for the time-critical force signal, while introducing acceptable video delay.