Development of Robot Control Interface with Multi-Bandwidth Communication

This paper presents a robot control interface with multi-bandwidth communication. Mobile robots are often deployed for ground exploration missions to assist humans in dangerous tasks. An operator, at least, is needed not only to control but also to monitor the mobile robot behaviors. Most of remote-controlled robots use Wi-Fi as the main communication network due to its high bandwidth. However, that network is vulnerable to environments and may disappear altogether. Low bandwidth communication, on the other hand, is more robust to such environments. Therefore, we propose a new robot control interface for combining high and low bandwidth communication that allows a complete network switching. The use of multi-bandwidth communication prevents the system from losing the network connection, and thus the missions will not be interrupted. The proposed method has been applied to motion planning applications, resulting in successful missions even though the main network is completely lost. Furthermore, the network switching process requires no actions from the operator and there are no changes to the control interface, making it easier to use. We also applied a binary encoding for communication protocol, and roughly 43.75% of speed improvement could be achieved compared to the previous method.