Wireless Time Sensitive Networking for Industrial Collaborative Robotic Workcells

In this paper, we describe a collaborative robotic workcell testbed enabled by Wireless Time Sensitive Networking (WTSN) technologies and discuss deployment, performance measurement and management guidelines challenges. We detail the methodologies for implementing and characterizing the performance of key WTSN capabilities (time synchronization and time-aware scheduling) over IEEE 802.11/Wi-Fi. We deployed WTSN capabilities on the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) collaborative robotic workcell testbed consisting of two robotic arms that emulates a material handling application, known as machine tending. We further explore configurations and measurement methodologies to characterize Quality of Experience (QoE) of this use case and correlate it to the performance of the wireless network.