Models of the effect of teleoperation transmission delay on robot movement time

Recent research of [Scholcover and Gillan (2018)] has shown experimentally that system transmission delay has a linear effect on the time taken to perform a complex tracking task with a simple teleoperated robot. This note shows that, for the case of moving a robot through a straight path, this relationship is predicted. The result is a simple modification of Drury’s law to take into account the system delay. This work extends the model for performance under intermittent illumination of Drury to the effects of fixed delays in task performance, occurring with teleoperated robots. In all cases, there was empirical evidence for the predicted linear relationship. Practitioner summary: When there is a delay in system response for robotic teleoperation between a control input and system output, movement time (MT) is increased and the increased times are linearly related to the system delay. This is true for zero and first-order control and for delays occurring before and after the control action.