  An eye-movement-based predicted trajectory guidance control (ePTGC) is
proposed to mitigate the maneuverability degradation of a teleoperated ground
vehicle caused by communication delays. Human sensitivity to delays is the main
reason for the performance degradation of a ground vehicle teleoperation
system. The proposed framework extracts human intention from eye-movement.
Then, it combines it with contextual constraints to generate an
intention-compliant guidance trajectory, which is then employed to control the
vehicle directly. The advantage of this approach is that the teleoperator is
removed from the direct control loop by using the generated trajectories to
guide vehicle, thus reducing the adverse sensitivity to delay. The delay can be
compensated as long as the prediction horizon exceeds the delay. A
human-in-loop simulation platform is designed to evaluate the teleoperation
performance of the proposed method at different delay levels. The results are
analyzed by repeated measures ANOVA, which shows that the proposed method
significantly improves maneuverability and cognitive burden at large delay
levels (>200 ms). The overall performance is also much better than the PTGC
which does not employ the eye-movement feature.
