Automatic Regulation of the Information Flow in the Control Loops of a Web Teleoperated Robot

The use of the World Wide Web for robot teleoperation is growing in the last years due mainly to the pervasiveness of Internet and Web browsers, although Web interfaces usually use Ethernet networks that exhibit time unpredictability. Most recent research in the area has been focused on improving time predictability of the network under delays, jitter, and no guaranteed bandwidth. However, we believe that: i) not only the network, but every component in the interfaced system exhibit time unpredictability; and ii) improving time predictability is not the only solution: adapting the interfaced system to unpredictable conditions is also a possibility. In this paper we consider a Web interfaced robot as a set of control loops and describe and implement a hysteresis controller for regulating the flow of information through the loops as a method to satisfy the system time requirements under some unpredictable and varying conditions. For demonstrating the goodness of our algorithm, we: a) compare it with a near-optimal one automatically generated through reinforcement learning, and b) show an implementation of the algorithm for the direct teleoperation of a service mobile robot, obtaining a better behavior than the same system without flow regulation.