On the Communication Channel in Bilateral Teleoperation: An Experimental Study for Ethernet, WiFi, LTE and 5G

Teleoperated robots are believed to play an important role for future applications in industry, medicine and other domains. Examples for this are remote assembly and maintenance, surgery, diagnosis or deep-sea and space exploration. Such applications are made possible by state-of-the-art tactile manipulators, well-researched control schemes and novel communication technologies such as the fifth generation of mobile communication (5G). The achievable performance is highly dependent on the communication delay and thus on the distance between leader and follower station, as well as the potentially used wireless protocol. Specially in this regard, 5G is a promising technology compared to the other communication protocols for transferring tactile information. In this paper, we introduce our telepresence reference platform, which can be used for empirical evaluation of different algorithms and communications. Comparative analysis are conducted to capture the influence of wireless communication protocols on telepresence systems consisting of complex robotic arms. The experiment compares the influence of 5G, LTE and WiFi communication protocols with regard to the motion and force tracking performance of the system.