  Vehicle teleoperation is an interesting feature in many fields. A typical
problem of teleoperation is communication time delay which, together with
actuator saturation and environmental disturbance, can cause a vehicle
deviation from the target trajectory imposed by the human operator who imposes
to the vehicle a steering wheel angle reference and a speed/acceleration
reference. With predictive techniques, time-delay can be accounted at
sufficient extent. But, in presence of disturbances, due to the absence of
instantaneous haptic and visual feedback, human-operator steering command
transmitted to the the vehicle is unaccounted with disturbances observed by the
vehicle. To improve reference tracking without losing promptness in driving
control, reference trajectory in the form of successive reference poses can be
transmitted instead of steering commands to the vehicle. We introduce this new
concept, namely, the 'successive reference-pose tracking (SRPT)' to improve
path tracking in vehicle teleoperation. This paper discusses feasibility and
advantages of this new method, compare to the smith predictor control approach.
Simulations are performed in SIMULINK environment, where a 14-dof vehicle model
is being controlled with Smith and SRPT controllers in presence of variable
network delay. Scenarios for performance comparison are low adhesion ground,
strong lateral wind and steer-rate demanding maneuvers. Simulation result shows
significant improvement in reference tracking with SRPT approach.
