UNITE

Documentation

UNITE is an open-source, modular Unity testbed for building and reproducing delayed teleoperation studies. This guide gets you from a fresh clone to a running study, and explains how the pieces fit together.

Overview

Operating a robot in space means working across a communication delay of seconds to minutes, which makes control harder and pushes operators into slow, cautious strategies. Researchers test interfaces and control techniques that help, but each study tends to build its own experimental setup, which makes results hard to reproduce or compare across studies.

UNITE gives you the full experimental apparatus as a single, configurable Unity project. It models the whole teleoperation loop as a set of independent, swappable modules, following the path from the operator's input, up through the communication delay to the robot, and back down through delayed feedback to the operator's display. You describe a study by choosing and configuring modules; the result is a shareable configuration another researcher can open and run without rebuilding anything.

The UNITE teleoperation loop Operator commands travel up through a communication delay to the robot; the robot's feedback travels back down through a communication delay to the operator's display. Operator station Input provider Command mapping State reconstruction Operator presentation Robot Vehicle / robot model Observation & capture Uplink · commands delay delay Downlink · feedback
Every study is this loop. UNITE makes each stage a swappable module, so you can change one part (the delay, the input device, an assistance technique) without rebuilding the rest.

What you can do with UNITE

  • Set up and run a delayed-teleoperation study in Unity without writing the plumbing yourself.
  • Swap one part (the delay model, the input device, an assistance technique, the task) while holding everything else fixed.
  • Reproduce or extend a published study from its shared configuration.
  • Capture synchronized, timestamped data for your metrics.

Where to go next

Get started Install UNITE and run your first study. Core concepts The teleoperation loop, modules, and configuration as a study. Module reference Every module: what it does and how to configure or replace it.