Towards Stable Teleoperation of Cybernetic Avatars: Design and Evaluation of a Hybrid Traffic Management Platform

Abstract

Many countries face aging populations and declining birth rates, prompting exploration of information and communication technology (ICT)-driven solutions, including robotics. Japan’s Moonshot Project Goal 1 aims to develop cybernetic avatars (CAs) for a sustainable society where individuals maximize abilities and pursue diverse lifestyles. CAs go beyond teleoperated avatars by integrating ICT and robotics to enhance physical and cognitive functions, enabling teleoperators (TOs) to engage in social activities remotely. Stable teleoperation requires high communication quality, especially when network paths lack guaranteed bandwidth or quality of service (QoS). This paper proposes a CA reliability-ensuring platform with hybrid traffic management, comprising communication quality monitoring and visualization, jitter buffering, and dynamic path switching. The platform deploys called support node with these functions at several points in the end-to-end (E2E) network and in TO and CA devices. To evaluate the platform, a dual-arm robot (as CA) and control device were set up between two sites 70 km apart, with tests introducing quality degradation such as jitter and packet loss. In the E2E network, normal root mean square (RMS) of the difference of packet delay was 7.28 ms, calculated as a magnitude of jitter, while added jitter increased it to 20.87 ms. Using jitter buffering, the RMS was reduced to 0.84 ms. Dynamic path switching also stabilized teleoperation under packet loss, confirming the platform’s effectiveness.