ROS-based Telerobotic Application for Transmitting High-bandwidth Kinematic Data Over a Limited Network

Abstract

The Robotic Operating System (ROS) has provided a set of packages for Networked Telerobotic Systems (NTS) to transport high-bandwidth ROS topics over a websocket communication. The main concern was to transport high-bandwidth sensory and kinematic information over the web with a smaller bandwidth usage and a lower time-delay. Yet their solution for transporting kinematic data over the web is not a low-bandwidth-friendly solution. It sends kinematic transforms only on demand which is certainly a better solution than sending a constant stream of data, but not optimal since some of this data is secondary and can be discarded. In this paper we present a new strategy to reduce the amount of bandwidth devoted to ROS kinematic transforms during a web-based manipulation. We proceed by selecting the primary transforms from the amount of information. Only those transforms will be sent to clients. We propose an improved method to choose whether or not a transform is primary and will able to reduce more than 80% of bandwidth consumption. Experimental results are shown to validate the efficiency of the suggest method in a real time environment.