Collaboration between TU Delft and IISC teams establishes intercontinental teleoperation links

During the past summer, research groups from TU Delft and the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) in Bengaluru joined forces to establish an end-to-end system that allows for the real-time teleoperation of a robot across continents.

Although long-distance teleoperation systems can have a momentous impact on many applications like telesurgery and remote disaster management, in practice, it is difficult to realise them over long distances due to the delays imposed by the network. With this project, the researchers aimed to address these difficulties by testing a novel hybrid strategy relying on the combination of ideas from Model Mediated Teleoperation and Tactile Internet.

The project was carried out by teams from TU Delft's Networked Systems Lab with the leadership of Associate Professor Dr. RangaRao Venkatesha Prasad and IISc's Zero Energy Networks Lab with the leadership of Dr. TV Prabhakar. Furthermore, to carry out the project, two master students from TU Delft - Jorge Romeu Huidobro and Pavlos Makridis - were hosted in IISC for the duration of the project, demonstrating the close collaboration between the two groups.

In the end, a working prototype that allowed operators in the Netherlands to interact with a dynamic environment in India was deployed, demonstrating the potential of the underlying design ideas. Moreover, the system provides an excellent platform for more research to be conducted in the future and is currently being used by research projects at both universities.