TELEOPERATION OF A MOBILE ROBOT VIA UMTS LINK

Nowadays available broadband wireless communication technologies offer a broad spectrum of applications and the todays availability of UMTS technology has a great potential in the area of networked robotics. This work investigates teleoperation of mobile robots via UMTS communication links. First, several scenarios with artificially generated command traffic between mobile robot and operator are analyzed in order to gain knowledge of the link behavior. In a next step real mobile robot hardware is remote controlled via UMTS. Thereby, the robot transmits sensor data and a video stream of its onboard camera while receiving commands from the operator. The focus of this work is set on the measurement and analysis of the round trip time and the packet inter-arrival time of data in different scenarios like the connection of two UMTS nodes, the connection of an Internet PC and an UMTS node, or the behavior of several UMTS nodes generating a large amount of data. The results clearly show how applications for mobile robot teleoperation can efficiently use UMTS communication in order to allow seamless teleoperation between operator and hardware in distant locations.