On-line estimation of communication time delay in a robotic teleoperation system

Abstract

An estimation technique to compute on-line the communication time-delay in a robotic teleoperation system is presented. The proposed algorithm is based on the concept of correlation function and time-delay estimation. The estimation is obtained with an additional signal injected through the communication channel, that is correlated to another signal (of the same kind) generated at the remote station. This way, the correlation function is computed along with its maximum which, multiplied by the sampling time, will result in the desired time delay. Simulation results show the improvement of the teleoperation system performance when using both the communication time delay compensation structure and the time delay estimator. Finally, a comparison between the proposed algorithm and Matlab's xcorr function to compute time delay is performed.