Skip to main content
Springer Nature Link
Log in

ViMediaNet: an emulation system for interactive multimedia based telepresence services

  • Published:
The Journal of Supercomputing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The telepresence service (TPS) leverages advanced communication, virtual reality, and cooperative web technologies to provide remote engaged users an immersive experience of being fully present, which are widely used in teleconferencing, remote surgery, and hazardous environment exploration. The common feature of TPS-based applications lies in that the users’ experiences heavily depend on the quality of interactive multimedia services, that is, most deliveries of multimedia contents are mission-critical, as well as time-critical, to ensure the control and operation accuracy for telerobots. Therefore, the delivery performance of multimedia contents over heterogeneous networks becomes the primary concern in the TPS system design, especially for those delay sensitive applications, like remote surgery and environment exploration. In this paper, we incorporate video processing tools with the network simulator to design and implement a joint emulation system, named as the virtual media network (ViMediaNet), through which, the TPS designer can readily deploy the TPS system over a heterogeneous network virtualized by the network emulator, investigate the critical network performance metrics in the multimedia content delivery, such as transmission delay and packet jitter, and observe control results in real time. To verify the capability of ViMediaNet in emulating the real-setting TPS system, we take a mobile device based vision navigation system as an example to evaluate performance impacts of the rate adaptation technology in the telerobot control. The experimental results reveal that the adaptive video streaming is a promising solution to significantly enhance the control accuracy of telerobots in TPS systems.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Subscribe and save

Springer+ Basic
$34.99 /Month
  • Get 10 units per month
  • Download Article/Chapter or eBook
  • 1 Unit = 1 Article or 1 Chapter
  • Cancel anytime
Subscribe now

Buy Now

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Draper JV, Kaber DB, Usher JM (1998) Telepresence. Hum Factors 40(3):354–375

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Tsui KM, Desai M, Yanco HA, Uhlik C (2011) Exploring use cases for telepresence robots. In: 2011 6th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI), Lausanne, pp 11–18

  3. Ballantyne G (2002) Robotic surgery, telerobotic surgery, telepresence, and telementoring. Surg Endosc Other Interv Tech 16(10):1389–1402

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Kritoffersson A, Coradeschi S, Loutfi A (2013) A review of mobile robotic telepresence. Adv Hum Comput Interact 2013:1–17

  5. Stoker CR, Barch DR, Hine BP III, Barry J (1995) Antarctic undersea exploration using a robotic submarine with a telepresence user interface. IEEE Expert Intell Syst Their Appl 10(6):14–23

    Google Scholar 

  6. Kauff P, Schreer O (2002) An immersive 3d video-conferencing system using shared virtual team user environments. In: CVE 2002 Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Collaborative Virtual Environments, pp 105–112

  7. Marescaux J, Leroy J, Rubino F et al (2002) Transcontinental robot-assisted remote telesurgery: feasibility and potential applications. Ann Surg 235(4):487–492

  8. Ogawa K, Nishio S, Koda K, Taura K, Minato T, Ishii CT, Ishiguro H (2011) Telenoid: tele-presence android for communication. In: ACM SIGGRAPH 2011 emerging technologies (SIGGRAPH ’11). ACM, NY, USA

  9. Ledin JA (1999) Hardware-in-the-loop simulation. Embed Syst Program 12(2):42–60

    Google Scholar 

  10. Gaspar J, Winters N, Santos-Victor J (2000) Vision-based navigation and environmental representations with an omnidirectional camera. IEEE Trans Robot Autom 16(6):890–898

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Evensen K, Kupka T, Riiser H, Ni P, Eg R, Griwodz C, Halvorsen P (2014) Adaptive media streaming to mobile devices: Challenges, enhancements, and recommendations. Adv Multimed 2014:1–21

  12. Ivanic N, Rivera B, Adamson B (2009) Mobile ad hoc network emulation environment. In: Military Communications Conference, 2009. MILCOM 2009. IEEE, Oct. (2009)

  13. wiredNEM, wiredNEM: Wired network emulation plugins for EMANE. https://github.com/tll-summer/emane-wirednetwork-csmacd. Accessed 23 July 2016

  14. Culjak I, Abram D, Pribanic T, Dzapo H, Cifrek M(2012) A brief introduction to opencv. In: MIPRO, 2012 proceedings of the 35th international convention, pp 1725–1730, May, 2012

  15. VideoCapture, videocapture: a python extension for accessing video devices. http://videocapture.sourceforge.net/. Accessed 21 July 2016

  16. RFC3550, Rtp: A transport protocol for real-time applications, http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3550. Accessed 23 July 2016

  17. RFC3626, Optimized link state routing protocol (olsr). http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3626.txt. Accessed 23 July 2016

  18. Ross KW, Kurose JF(1999) Computer networking: a top-down approach featuring the internet: preliminary edtion. Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, USA, pp 390–392

  19. Rule A, Forlizzi J(2012) Designing interfaces for multi-user and multi-robot systems. In: ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human–Robot Interaction

  20. htop, htop: an interactive process viewer for Linux. http://www.hisham.hm/htop/. Accessed 23 July 2016

  21. Ryerson University, PEBBLES. http://www.ryerson.ca/pebbles/. Accessed 26 Feb 2016

  22. Anybots, QB. http://anybots.com. Accessed 2 Oct 2015

  23. Giraff Technologies AB, Giraff. http://www.giraff.org. Accessed 23 July 2016

  24. Willow Garage, “Texai”. http://www.willowgarage.com/pages/texai. Accessed 23 July 2016

  25. VGo Communications, VGo User Guide v1.5.0. http://www.vgocom.com/sites/default/files/vgo_user_guide_v1.5.0.pdf. Accessed 23 July 2016

  26. Tsui K, Norton A, Brooks D, McCann E, Medvedev M, Allspaw J, Suksawat S, Dalphond J, Lunderville M, Yanco H (2014) Iterative design of a semi-autonomous social telepresence robot research platform: a chronology. Intell Serv Robot 7:103–119

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Tsui K, Desai M, Yanco H (2012) Towards measuring the quality of interaction: communication through telepresence robots. In: Proceedings of the workshop on performance metrics for intelligent systems (2012)

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Beijing Key Laboratory of IoT Information Security Technology, Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100093, People’s Republic of China

    Xiang Lu, Linlin Tu, Xinyun Zhou & Limin Sun

  2. Jiangsu R&D Center for Internet of Things, Wuxi, 214135, Jiangsu, People’s Republic of China

    Xiang Lu & Linlin Tu

  3. Shanghai Key Lab of Modern Optical System, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200093, People’s Republic of China

    Naixue Xiong

Authors
  1. Xiang Lu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  2. Linlin Tu
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  3. Xinyun Zhou
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  4. Naixue Xiong
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

  5. Limin Sun
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author inPubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Xiang Lu.

Additional information

This work was supported in part by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (Grant No. 2013AA014002), and the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (Grant No. XDA06040104).

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Lu, X., Tu, L., Zhou, X. et al. ViMediaNet: an emulation system for interactive multimedia based telepresence services. J Supercomput 73, 3562–3578 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-016-1821-9

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-016-1821-9

Keywords