New Network Protocol Enabled Control for Internet-based Teleoperations

In Internet-based robot teleoperation systems, random delays introduced by the Internet can lead to instability, loss of transparency, and synchronization problems in the robot system. Although existing control methods use prediction, compensation and event-based technologies to address the problems caused by random delays, these methods do not deal with random delays and network conditions themselves, and still face certain limitations in practice. To overcome these difficulties, we designed a new Internet transmission protocol called Tele-Robotic Control Protocol (TRCP) as a new dedicated communication protocol to provide a complete solution for robot remote operation. The TRCP provides reliable and efficient data transmission for the system, which has been experimentally implemented on test rigs at three robotics laboratories. We also developed the event-based robotic teleoperation system to compare TRCP with other protocols. Both the theoretical and experimental results show that the proposed protocol significantly enhances other methods, solves the problems caused by random delays, and ensures the stability, transparency, and synchronization of the system.