HUMAN ENGINEERED REMOTE DRIVING SYSTEM

Methods and apparatus are provided for driving a vehicle from a remote control station achieving tele-operation of the vehicle. A television sensor mounted on the vehicle provides video image information which is reduced in bandwidth by a factor of approximately 1000:1 for transmission by narrow band RF data link to a remote control station. The large bandwidth reduction is accomplished by first sampling the video output of the sensor at a reduced frame rate and then compressing the data further by standard data compression techniques. Vehicle position and attitude data which may be derived from the vehicle's on board inertial reference unit are also transmitted via narrow band data link to the control station. At the control station, the data is first reconstructed by a technique which is the complement of the compression technique, and the instantaneous position and attitude data are used to compute transform coefficients that are used by a pipeline processor to extrapolate the frame data to generate a real time video display that enables an operator to drive the vehicle by transmitting appropriate control signals to the vehicle.