Telerobotics, the control of semi-autonomous robots from a distance, is an attractive application for various industries. From an operator perspective, a higher Quality of Experience results in better task performance and task efficiency. Quality of Experience in telerobotics is a broad concept comprised of direct, indirect, hedonic, and pragmatic elements, which are in turn influenced by various Quality of Service elements.
Constant innovations are being made in the technological performance of single-modal and multimodal interfaces, such as innovations in Mixed and Virtual Reality (XR/VR), haptic interfaces, displays and audio. As a result, these interfaces are capable of offering a sensory experiences that are rich and provide more information to the user. Whilst there has
been a significant focus within the literature to investigate the effect of the quality of single modal or multimodal sensory information on user performance and user experience, current literature has been unsuccessful at quantifying Quality of Experience (QoE) in relation to multimodal Quality of Service (QoS) settings. Early attempts at establishing a relation between QoE and QoS either present a high-level non-measurable overview or do not specify metrics for relevant QoS and QoE attributes. Furthermore, the existing frameworks are not specifically tailored to the context of teleoperation.
This research aims to build upon the existing literature in order to establish a coherent framework of relevant quality of service attributes and to quantify their weighted influence on the quality of experience in a teleoperations setup. Furthermore, this research aims to evaluate the accuracy of the framework through the design and execution of a single
or multimodal experiments measuring the effect of quality of service degradations on the quality of experience.
In doing so, this research aims to answer the main research question: "How does Quality of Service contribute to the Quality of Experience of a multimodal teleoperations setup?".
