Abstract—Remotely controlled robotics devices require connectivity to a remote server to maintain the stability of control. We implicitly assume that we can utilize such always-on connectivity and availability over the existing mobile Internet. This always-on property will be lost when the device moves out from coverage area of a wireless network, and thus we cannot control the device unless the device returns to the coverage area. Many mobile carriers made a tremendous investment to extend the coverage area and we can now enjoy the mobile network spread across almost anywhere in our nation. As long as we focus on our smartphone application, we do not feel interruption of connectivity during communication. Our question here is that if a remotely controlled robotics device can perceive the same way as human feels for our mobile networks. We investigated the behavior of a robotics device that requires continuous high frequency feedback-based controls between the device and a remote server over the mobile Internet. Our experiments show that robotics devices experience large impact by delay variation by handovers from the viewpoint of robotics control. The delay variation does not have a big influence on our daily smartphone usage so we perceive that our mobile network can provide always-on connectivity. On the other hand, for remote robotics control, the delays effectively create interruptions of connectivity and thus we should handle the underlining network as a network with intermittent connectivity. Based on the observation above, we propose metrics to evaluate such intermittency for our robotics applications.

 

Index Terms—Intermittent, robotics control, quality metric, simulation, measurement

Cite: Arata Koike and Yoshiko Sueda, "Defining Quality of Services for Remotely Controlled Robotics Devices under Intermittent Communication Environment," Journal of Communications vol. 15, no. 5, pp. 427-432, May 2020. Doi: 10.12720/jcm.15.5.427-432

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