Delay-Constrained Teleoperation Task Scheduling and Assignment for Human+Machine Hybrid Activities Over FiWi Enhanced Networks

Abstract

With the advent of semi-autonomous robotic assistance systems, their integration into human teams is starting to gain steam as part of the vision of human+machine hybrid activities. Unlike their fully autonomous counterparts, semi-autonomous robotic systems mainly rely on human assistance from time to time via teleoperation when human expertise is needed to accomplish a given task. As these robots will need to request human assistance via teleoperation, mapping these requests to human teleoperators stands as a difficult optimization problem. In this paper, after shedding some light on our envisioned FiWi enhanced network infrastructure and its role in realizing the emerging Tactile Internet, we formulate the problem of joint prioritized scheduling and assignment of delay-constrained teleoperation tasks to human operators with the objective to minimize the average weighted task completion time, maximum tardiness, and average operational expenditure (OPEX) per task. We then propose our context-aware prioritized scheduling and task assignment (CAPSTA) algorithm to achieve suitable trade-offs between the contradicting objectives of the problem. Further, to estimate the end-to-end packet delay of local and non-local teleoperation over FiWi enhanced networks, we develop our analytical framework, which flexibly allows for the coexistence of conventional human-to-human (H2H) and haptic human-to-machine (H2M) traffic.