An experimental study of lossy compression in a real telepresence and teleaction system

High network requirements of multiple degrees of freedom haptic data exchange represent a challenge in modern telepresence and teleaction systems. This study presents a systematic evaluation of a psychophysics-based approach to lossy haptic data compression proposed in the literature: the deadband approach and its extension which introduces additional signal model based prediction. In an experimental study, the effects of these approaches on packet rate reduction, perceived interface quality, and relevant task performance criteria were investigated in a three degrees of freedom telepresence and teleaction system. The results indicate that the extended approach did not lead to significant data reduction and adversely affected perceived interface quality as well as task performance. Without prediction, the deadband approach showed excellent rate reduction performance without adversely affecting perceived interface quality and most task performance criteria. We conclude from our study that the combined deadband and prediction approach is not practical for a telepresence and teleaction system with the used control structure, while the deadband compression approach alone exceeded expectations.