Bidirectional Transport Protocol for Teleoperated Robots

Abstract

This paper describes a new Internet transport protocol applied to teleoperated tasks. This protocol, called bidirectional transport protocol (BTP), has demonstrated reliable performance regarding time spent for packet transmission. This protocol provides a novel congestion control technique which enhances application and transport layer performance. Internet still has some limitations, such as variable jitter, bandwidth, or congestion. New techniques have to be looked into so as to enable proper bilateral teleoperation. Most research to date focuses on the application layer such as control techniques (e.g., passivity) or predictive displays. Only a few studies are devoted to the transport layer or communication protocols. A testbed based on master-slave architecture has been used for testing BTP versus user datagram protocol (UDP). Transmission control protocol flows also coexist with the transmitted teleoperation data. Results show that the proposed protocol significantly enhances the UDP approach by achieving a minimum round trip time and interarrival time in relation to the available bandwidth of the network.