  Maneuverability and drivability of the teleoperated ground vehicle could be
seriously degraded by large communication delays if the delays are not properly
compensated. This paper proposes a predicted trajectory guidance control (PTGC)
framework to compensate for such delays, thereby improving the performance of
the teleoperation system. The novelty of this PTGC framework is that
teleoperators intended trajectory is predicted at the vehicle side with their
delayed historical control commands and the LiDAR 3D point cloud of the
environment, and then the vehicle is guided by the predicted trajectory. By
removing the teleoperator from the direct control loop, the presented method is
less sensitive to delays, and delays are compensated as long as the prediction
horizon exceeds the delays. Human-in-the-loop simulation experiments are
designed to evaluate the teleoperation performance with the proposed method
under five delay levels. Based on the repeated measurement analysis of
variance, it is concluded that the PTGC method can significantly improve the
performance of the teleoperated ground vehicles under large delays(>200ms),
such as the task completion time (TCT), deviation to centerline (D2C) and
steering effort (SE). In addition, the results also show that teleoperators can
adapt to smaller delays, and the presented method is ineffective in such cases.
