Network Traffic Reduction in Haptic Telepresence Systems by Deadband Control

Current haptic (force feedback) telepresence systems operated over a communication network as, e.g. the Internet, require high packet rates for the transmission of the command and sensor signals. We propose a novel approach to reduce the network traffic by means of deadband control. Data packets are only sent if the sampled signal changes more than a given threshold value. Passivity based estimation methods are introduced to reconstruct the missing values for the resulting empty sampling instances at the receiver. Thereby the passivity/stability of the overall system is achieved. Experiments are conducted in order to show the validity of our approach.