4.12.2025 IfI Colloquium: A Robotic Teleoperation Framework Using Digital Twins
Speaker:
Dr. Venkata Prabhakar, Indian Institute of Science IISc, Bengaluru, India
Date: Thursday, 4 December 2025, 17:15
Location: room BIN 2.A.01 at the Department of Informatics (IfI), Binzmühlestrasse 14, 8050 Zürich
Details about the format of the talk shall be checked always just ahead of a certain presentation date: (information here)
Abstract
Remote Robotic surgery imposes a significant cognitive burden on the surgeon due to latency between entities. Real-time teleoperation of robots requires strict latency bounds for control and feedback. We propose a dual digital twin (DT) framework and explain the simulation environment and teleoperation framework. The doctor visually controls a locally available DT of the patient side and thus experiences minimum latency. The second digital twin serves two purposes. Firstly, it provides a layer of safety for operator-related mishaps, and secondly, it takes the role of a semantic encoder and thus reduces the network traffic by over 25x. We show that teleoperation accuracy and user experience are enhanced with our approach. Experimental results using the NASA-TLX metric show that the quality of surgery is vastly improved with DT, perhaps due to reduced cognitive burden.
Bio
Dr. T. Venkata Prabhakar is a Chief Research Scientist at the Indian Institute of Science IISc, Bengaluru, India. He works in Networked Embedded Systems, focusing on electronic system design, energy harvesting systems, and power management algorithms. His group builds embedded electronic systems for application areas such as Space IOT, Urban Air Mobility, Industrial, and Tactile IoT.
He has over 125 publications in international journals and conferences and several best-paper awards. The latest best paper award, titled "EdgeP4: In-Network Edge Intelligence for a Tactile Cyber-Physical System Testbed Across Cities", was in IEEE INFOCOMM's 2024 CNERT. He is engaged with about 100 MSMEs and facilitates funding and technical advice under the MSME Centre of Excellence. Dr. Prabhakar holds an MSc in Physic, an MSc in Engineering, and a Ph.D. degree.