Real-Time Video Server Implementation for a Mobile Robot

Abstract

Most of robots are using vision for various applications. In some cases, mobile robots are provided with an insufficient onboard processing hardware, and therefore video from cameras needs to be transmitted in an efficient and reliable way to a more powerful system for further off-board processing. Multiple difficulties could be faced during video streaming software development, including high latencies, network congestion, packet losses, distortions and others, which makes trade-offs between video quality, bitrate, frame rate, and packet loss inevitable. Thus, the key problem is to find such parameters, which will satisfy the specified needs. In our work we implement a video streaming server on mobile robot Servosila Engineer. A set of experiments demonstrated that high bitrates and frame rates increase load on CPU. Packet losses could be mitigated by decreasing bitrate to 100-200 kbps.