Dynamic Optimization of a Remote Control Cycle for Better Responsiveness

Recently, the number of industrial robots connected to the Internet as Internet of Things (IoT) applications has increased. These machines mainly use wireless Internet connections rather than wired connections so that they have more mobility. To improve the responsiveness of a robot remote control system, it is important to select the control cycle that minimizes both control cycle and communication delay simultaneously. This minimization is difficult in general because the communication frequency affects the communication delay. In the present paper, we measure the communication delay when transmitting small packets with high frequency. We then present a novel method to minimize the summation of the control cycle and the communication delay and evaluate the results by simulation of remote control of a mobile robot. The simulation shows that the moving time and the precision improved by up to 70.2 % with the proposed method.