Marginal probabilistic modeling of the delays in the sensory data transmission of networked telerobots.

Networked telerobots are remotely controlled through general purpose networks and components, which are highly heterogeneous and exhibit stochastic response times; however their correct teleoperation requires a timely flow of information from sensors to remote stations. In order to guarantee these time requirements, a good on-line probabilistic estimation of the sensory transmission delays is needed. In many modern applications this estimation must be computationally highly efficient, e.g., when the system includes a web-based client interface. This paper studies marginal probability distributions that, under mild assumptions, can be a good approximation of the real distribution of the delays without using knowledge of their dynamics, are efficient to compute, and need minor modifications on the networked robot. Since sequences of delays exhibit strong non-linearities in these networked applications, to satisfy the iid hypothesis required by the marginal approach we apply a change detection method. The results reported here indicate that some parametrical models explain well many more real scenarios when using this change detection method, while some non-parametrical distributions have a very good rate of successful modeling in the case that non-linearity detection is not possible and that we split the total delay into its three basic terms: server, network and client times.