Haptic Teleoperation goes Wireless: Evaluation and Benchmarking of a High-Performance Low-Power Wireless Control Technology

TL;DR

This paper evaluates a novel low-power wireless control protocol, GALLOP, for haptic teleoperation in nuclear decommissioning, demonstrating it can match wired performance and outperform standard Wi-Fi in terms of delay and reliability.

Contribution

It introduces GALLOP, a new Bluetooth-based wireless control technology, and benchmarks its performance against wired and Wi-Fi methods in a haptic teleoperation context.

Findings

GALLOP performs comparably to wired TCP/IP in teleoperation tasks.

GALLOP outperforms standard Wi-Fi TCP/IP in delay and packet loss.

Wireless control with GALLOP is feasible for high-performance teleoperation.

Abstract

Communication delays and packet losses are commonly investigated issues in the area of robotic teleoperation. This paper investigates application of a novel low-power wireless control technology (GALLOP) in a haptic teleoperation scenario developed to aid in nuclear decommissioning. The new wireless control protocol, which is based on an off-the-shelf Bluetooth chipset, is compared against standard implementations of wired and wireless TCP/IP data transport. Results, through objective and subjective data, show that GALLOP can be a reasonable substitute for a wired TCP/IP connection, and performs better than a standard wireless TCP/IP method based on Wi-Fi connectivity.