Deep Learning-based Delay Compensation Framework For Teleoperated Wheeled Rovers on Soft Terrains

The difficulties posed by terrain-induced slippage for wheeled rovers traversing soft terrains are critical to ensuring safe and precise mobility. While bilateral teleoperation systems offer a promising solution to this issue, the inherent network-induced delays hinder the fidelity of the closed-loop integration, potentially compromising teleoperator system controls, and resulting in poor command-tracking performance. This work introduces a new model-free predictor framework based on deep learning designed to improve prediction performance and effectively compensate for large network delays in teleoperated wheeled rovers. Our approach employs the Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) to achieve a significant improvement in modeling complexity and prediction accuracy. Particularly, our framework consists of two distinct predictors, each tailored to the forward and backward coupling variables of the teleoperated wheeled rover. Human-in-the-loop experiments were conducted to validate the effectiveness of the developed framework in compensating for the delays encountered by teleoperated wheeled rovers coupled with terrain-induced slippage. The results confirm the improved prediction accuracy of the framework. This improvement is evidenced by improved performance and transparency metrics, which lead to better command-tracking performance. A supplementary video is available at https://youtu.be/-06UGumQ0tA.