Data Transmission of a ROS-Based Autonomous Vehicle Over a Private 5G Network

Interest in teleoperations and edge-computing in robotics is increasing and 5 G satisfies requirements for reliable and real-time data transfer for safety-critical and mobile robots. In contrast to commercial 5 G, the network traffic and Base Transceiver Station configurations can be fully controlled in private 5 G network. This creates optimal conditions for the low latency required for transmitting sensor data and commands between an autonomous Utility Task Vehicle in its test area and the remotely controlling PC. The Key Performance Indicators latency and throughput are measured with the autonomous Robot Operating System based UTV equipped with a suite of sensors. The ROS core on the UTV is configured to communicate over 5 G network. The base station consists of Commercial Off-The-Shelf Nokia AirScale radio and baseband products. The 5G Core User Plane is local, so the user data was processed close to the edge of the network, allowing lower latency communication. The Control Plane is hosted in Nokia data center for centralized management of the national Nokia Test Network Finland. The overall mean Round-Trip Time without load without optimization over ROS is promising with 11.485 ms.