The Radio Degradation Challenge: Fostering a Joint System Design of Robotics and Communication for Better Application Robustness

Robot competitions are a valuable platform in robotics research for evaluating various designs in situations and environments of interest, such as challenging terrain or complex manipulation tasks. Since challenging network conditions are expected in the targeted scenarios, integrating them into competitions is necessary to evaluate the performance of robotic designs in network-constrained environments and to foster communications considerations during the design of robotic systems. This paper proposes and demonstrates an integration approach for custom network degradation in robotic competitions. The competitions attended yielded performance evaluations of the robots under network degradation and highlighted optimization potential, which in one case even led to network setup enhancements and raised the robot's overall performance by 40%. One aspect of the carried out enhancements is demonstrated in an experiment to explain the observed performance increase. The results showcase the impact of network degradation on the evaluated robots' performance and illustrates potential gains achievable through optimization of the data transmission pipeline. Video Abstract-Demonstration video available online at https://tiny.cc/RadioDegradationChallenge