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Data Communications for Internet Robots

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Abstract

For Internet robots, the most challenging and distinct difficulties are well recognized to be associated with Internet transmission delays, delay jitter and not-guaranteed bandwidth, which might degrade system performance dramatically or even lead to instability. Current approaches to data communication between the remote robot and the human operator employ directly one of the two currently available protocols, i.e. TCP and UPD. In this paper, a teleoperation-oriented data transmission mechanism is implemented. Compared to TCP, the presented scheme provides minimized transmission delays and delay jitter; in the steady state, its transmission rate is much smoother; when available network bandwidth changes, it adapts to the variation quickly without large overshoot. Compared to UDP, it is inter-protocol fairness convergent, intro-protocol convergent, and efficient convergent. The presented mechanism is deployed in a mobile robot teleoperation system developed. In the experiments, users successfully guided a Pioneer-2 mobile robot through a laboratory environment remotely over the Internet via a web browser.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Systems and Computer Engineering, Carleton University, Ottawa, ON, Canada

    Peter Xiaoping Liu

  2. Department of Electronic Engineering, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong

    Max Q.-H. Meng

  3. School of Engineering, University of Guelph, Guelph, ON, Canada

    Simon X. Yang

Authors
  1. Peter Xiaoping Liu
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  2. Max Q.-H. Meng
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  3. Simon X. Yang
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Liu, P.X., Meng, M.QH. & Yang, S.X. Data Communications for Internet Robots. Autonomous Robots 15, 213–223 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026160302776

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026160302776

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