End-to-end congestion control protocols for internet telerobotics

Internet Telerobotics presents many interesting aspects within the context of master/slave teleoperation like variable bandwidth and time-delays. Some of these aspects have been treated in the literature from the control point of view. However, only a few works are related to the way internet protocols can help to minimize the effect of delay and bandwidth fluctuation on teleoperation. In this paper we present the capabilities of TCP, UDP, TCP Las Vegas, TEAR, and Trinomial protocols when performing an Internet teleoperation. The comparative analysis is presented through simulations within the NS2 platform. Conclusions present a set of requirements that are necessary in order to define the SNRTP protocol (Simple Network Robot Transport Protocol), which is specifically being designed for Internet teleoperation. The SNRTP protocol tries to minimize the end-to-end timedelay by using as much bandwidth and possible (e.g asymmetric networks), and maintaining the TCP-Friendly criteria. Moreover, the SNRTP is being designed to be fully integrated with the HTTP-based robotics application protocol SNRP (Simple Network Robot Protocol), which have been described in detail in previous works.

[1]  Deborah Estrin,et al.  RAP: An end-to-end rate-based congestion control mechanism for realtime streams in the Internet , 1999, IEEE INFOCOM '99. Conference on Computer Communications. Proceedings. Eighteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies. The Future is Now (Cat. No.99CH36320).

[2]  Peter Xiaoping Liu,et al.  Data Communications for Internet Robots , 2003, Auton. Robots.

[3]  Kazuo Tanie,et al.  Web Services Based Robot Control Platform for Ubiquitous Functions , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[4]  Paul S. Schenker,et al.  Network robotics: dynamic reconfigurable architectures , 2004, SPIE Optics East.

[5]  Richard Zurawski.  Industrial Information Technology Is Coming of Age , 2007, IEEE Trans. Ind. Informatics.

[6]  Injong Rhee,et al.  TEAR: TCP emulation at receivers – flow control for multimedia streaming , 2000 .

[7]  Paul S. Schenker,et al.  Robot Scpaces, Module Networks and Distributed Robot Architectures , 2004 .

[8]  Li Ping,et al.  Transport layer protocol reconfiguration for network-based robot control system , 2005, Proceedings. 2005 IEEE Networking, Sensing and Control, 2005..

[9]  Roque Marín,et al.  The UJI Online Robot: An Education and Training Experience , 2003, Auton. Robots.

[10]  Henning Schulzrinne,et al.  RTP: A Transport Protocol for Real-Time Applications , 1996, RFC.

[11]  Raul Wirz,et al.  Remote control within the UJI Robotics Manufacturing Cell using FPGA-based vision , 2007, 2007 European Control Conference (ECC).

[12]  Henning Schulzrinne,et al.  The Loss-delay Based Adjustment Algorithm: a Tcp-friendly Adaptation Scheme , 1998 .

[13]  Roy T. Fielding,et al.  Principled design of the modern Web architecture , 2000, Proceedings of the 2000 International Conference on Software Engineering. ICSE 2000 the New Millennium.

[14]  Steven E. Butner,et al.  A real-time system for tele-surgery , 2001, Proceedings 21st International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems.

[15]  Oussama Khatib,et al.  Robust Haptic Teleoperation of a Mobile Manipulation Platform , 2004, ISER.

[16]  Raul Wirz,et al.  Remote programming over multiple heterogeneous robots: a case study on distributed multirobot architecture , 2006, Ind. Robot.

[17]  J. Gialelis,et al.  Vertical integration of enterprise industrial systems utilizing Web services , 2004, IEEE International Workshop on Factory Communication Systems, 2004. Proceedings..

[18]  Kouhei Ohnishi,et al.  Bilateral robot system on the real time network structure , 2002, 7th International Workshop on Advanced Motion Control. Proceedings (Cat. No.02TH8623).

[19]  Jonathan B Postel.  DARPA Internet Program. Internet and Transmission Control Specifications , 1981 .

[20]  P.X. Liu,et al.  An end-to-end transmission architecture for the remote control of robots over IP networks , 2005, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics.

[21]  Sally Floyd,et al.  Promoting the use of end-to-end congestion control in the Internet , 1999, TNET.

[22]  Liang Guo,et al.  TCP-friendly SIMD congestion control and its convergence behavior , 2001, Proceedings Ninth International Conference on Network Protocols. ICNP 2001.

[23]  Raul Wirz,et al.  A multimodal interface to control a robot arm via the web: a case study on remote programming , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics.