An evaluation of connectivity and a control in a multilateral communication system

A technology that enables sharing of haptic information between several remote systems is required. A multilateral control system can implement the technology effectively. However, haptic information tends to deteriorate under communication delay because haptic information flow is bilateral. Because a conventional multilateral control connects all subsystems for information sharing, the information is greatly affected by time delay. Selecting the communication link is one way of solving the problem, however there was no means of evaluating the strength of the link. Therefore, two steps are proposed in this paper. First, an index called the "information volume" is proposed to quantify the amount of information in each subsystem. This index can be applied to a system that is experiencing time delay in its communication links. Using the index, the importance of each communication link can be quantified. Second, the algorithm to select the communication links is proposed based on the information volume. The target relationship regarding the information volumes is set, and unnecessary links are removed. The validity of the proposal is confirmed by experiments, and the results show that the degradation of haptic sensation under communication delay is prevented.