Presentation consistency in collaborative teleoperation systems

Collaborative teleoperation is a new concept to deal with highly complex tasks. It is being made possible by the quick advance in the technologies of Internet, shared virtual environments and robotics. Due to the heterogeneity of the Internet, operators participating in the collaboration from geographically distributed locations might receive feedback from the working site with different time delays, leading to various views of the scene. This asynchronization will make the collaboration difficult and compromise system efficiency. In this paper, we propose a new mechanism to achieve both inter-client and intra-client synchronization in collaborative teleoperation systems. Our approach uses an initial synchronization procedure, buffer management and feedback messages to synchronize data streams sent to geographically distributed operators. The delay bounds of the network do not necessarily need to be known and we use the time stamp in the initial and feedback messages for this purpose.