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IFAC PapersOnLine 52-25 (2019) 186–191
Communication system for remote control of service robots
Communication system for remote control of service robots
Communication system for remote control of service robots
Communication system for remote
Denis Chikurtev*, Ivaylocontrol of service robots
Rangelov**,
DenisYovchev***,
Kaloyan Chikurtev*, Nayden Ivaylo Rangelov**,
Chivarov*& **
Denis
Denis
Kaloyan Chikurtev*,
Chikurtev*,
Yovchev***, Ivaylo Rangelov**,
Ivaylo
Nayden Rangelov**,
Chivarov*& **
Denis Chikurtev*,  Ivaylo Rangelov**, &
Kaloyan
Kaloyan Yovchev***,
Yovchev***, Nayden Chivarov*
 Nayden Chivarov*& & **
**
Kaloyan Yovchev***,  Nayden Chivarov* **
*Institute of Information and Communication  Technologies-BAS, Sofia, Bulgaria
*Institute of Information
(e-mail: and Communication Technologies-BAS,
dchikurtev@gmail.com, nshivarov@code.bg). Sofia, Bulgaria
*Institute of
*Institute of Information
Information
(e-mail: and Communication
and Communication Technologies-BAS,
dchikurtev@gmail.com, Technologies-BAS,
nshivarov@code.bg). Sofia, Bulgaria
Sofia, Bulgaria
*Institute**European
of Information and Communication
Polytechnical
(e-mail:Polytechnical
dchikurtev@gmail.com, University,Technologies-BAS,
Pernik, Bulgaria (e-mail:
nshivarov@code.bg). Sofia, Bulgaria
(e-mail:
**European
(e-mail: dchikurtev@gmail.com,
dchikurtev@gmail.com, University, nshivarov@code.bg).
Pernik, Bulgaria
nshivarov@code.bg). (e-mail:
**European ivaylo172004@yahoo.com,
Polytechnical University, nedko@code.bg)
Pernik, Bulgaria (e-mail:
**European
**European Polytechnical
ivaylo172004@yahoo.com,
Polytechnical University,
University, Pernik,
nedko@code.bg)Bulgaria
Pernik, Sofia
Bulgaria (e-mail:
(e-mail:
*** Faculty of Mathematics
ivaylo172004@yahoo.com, and Informatics,
nedko@code.bg) University,
*** Faculty ivaylo172004@yahoo.com,
of Mathematics
ivaylo172004@yahoo.com, and nedko@code.bg)
Informatics, Sofia
nedko@code.bg) University,
*** Sofia,
Faculty of Bulgaria,
Mathematics (k.yovchev@fmi.uni-sofia.bg)
and Informatics, Sofia University,
***
*** Faculty Sofia,
Faculty of Mathematics
of Bulgaria,
Mathematics and
and Informatics,
Informatics, Sofia
(k.yovchev@fmi.uni-sofia.bg) Sofia University,
University,
Sofia,
Sofia, Bulgaria, (k.yovchev@fmi.uni-sofia.bg)
Sofia, Bulgaria,
Bulgaria, (k.yovchev@fmi.uni-sofia.bg)
(k.yovchev@fmi.uni-sofia.bg)
Abstract: the paper presents personalized communication system for remote control of service robots.
systemthe
Abstract:
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presents
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Abstract:
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presents IoT,personalized
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communication The system
structure
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©
system
2019,
system
Keywords:
system
is
is able
IFAC
able
is able
to
to provide
(International
provide
communication
to provide web
web
web remote
Federation
remote
system, control
of
control
remoteservice
of
Automatic
of
controlrobots,
service
service
of service
robots.
Control) Hosting
robots.
ROS,robots. by Elsevier
web remote control, network. Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: communication system, service robots, ROS, web remote control, network.
Keywords: communication system, service robots, ROS, web remote control, network.
Keywords:
Keywords: communication
communication system, system, service robots, ROS,
service robots, ROS, web web remote
remote control,
control, network.
network.
1. INTRODUCTION  The combination of communication systems, the Internet of
1. INTRODUCTION  The
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2405-8963 © 2019, IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Hosting by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Peer review under responsibility of International Federation of Automatic Control.
10.1016/j.ifacol.2019.12.470
 Denis Chikurtev et al. / IFAC PapersOnLine 52-25 (2019) 186–191 187
should allow the application of the latest communication and
Internet technologies. The idea is to develop flexible system
able to connect and integrate the different technologies and
external systems so as to maximize their capabilities.
Section 2 provides a description of robot hardware,
description of robot management software, and remote-
control features. A detailed description of the
telecommunication system under study, which allows remote
control of a service robot, is presented in section 3. Section 4
describes the experiments related to loading and rapid
operation of the studied system. Section 5 presents the results
obtained and section 6 draws conclusions about the work
done and future research.
2. WEB REMOTE CONTROL
In the use of a tele-control system, the information flow
between the robot and its operator significantly affects the
operator's dexterousness and efficiency (Hironao Yamada et
al., 2009). The two major issues with tele-control robots are
stability, robustness and transparency performance (M.
Boukhnifer et al., 2012). In addition, the remote control
assumes that the operator will use different devices to control
the robot.
In order to provide stability and robustness the
communication system has to provide fast and secure
connection. The system also has to provide functionalities
when we talk about service robots. These conditions set high
requirements to the communication and control systems
(Malakov, I et al., 2014). So, Wi-Fi based system is capable
of providing high speed and stability (B. Rakesh Reddy,
2014). In addition, the Internet technologies and web-based
technologies can provide the necessary functionalities.
Finally, we combined these two systems and our decision is
to develop web-based Wi-Fi communication system.
The system we propose in our common form is to connect the
operator's device to the robot's controller via Wi-Fi router
(fig.1). And in order to get maximum functionality, we add
an Internet connection that allows both remote control from
remote locations and additional features provided by Internet
technologies.
Figure 1. Proposed communication system.
Remote control robot uses a micro-controller which act as the
robot’s “brain”. It receives information from sensors and the
input portion of the human interface (the remote control
itself), decides what to do, then sends commands to the
motion systems and the output part of the human interface.
The communication between the robot assistant and the users
is a really important issue. It determines how fast he will
adapt to the system and starts using its full potential. That’s
why we created user interface for controlling the robot. With
this interface the control, setup and communication with the
robot could be done via any decent device with a web
browser – smartphone, tablet, laptop or a personal computer.
This type of interface allowed us to reduce costs for hardware
to their minimum, because this interface was hosted on
computer in the robot. To design and develop this type of
remote control is very important to know the detailed
information about all devices of the robot, because we will
compute, send/receive, use and display some of the data
through the system.
Sensors provide the robot with data and information about its
environment, such as images, sounds, temperatures and other
characteristics of its surroundings. Other parts of the remote-
control robots are their base (robot’s skeleton), motion
systems (wheels, gears, motors and associated electronics that
allow the robot move) and actuators (devices that can move
things or control other devices). Proposed web remote control
also has a human communications system, which allows
them to” talk” via a computer-generated voice. It can also
“listen” to instructions sent by keyboards, joystick, voice and
web user interface.
2.1. Description of the robot’s hardware
The robot includes two different processing units in order to
separate low-level and high-level processes.
For high-level processes, we are using server motherboard
“Intel S1200SP-L” and processor Intel Xeon E3-1230 v5. To
the robot’s PC over USB are connected the main controller
for the mobile platform, the main controller for the
manipulator, RPLIDAR and Real Sense.
The controller of the mobile platform is a Teensy 3.1, based
on the MK20DX256 32-bit ARMCortex-M4 and with a CPU
speed of 72 MHz. In this case, Teensy 3.1 is used for
processing low-level movement commands. Movement
instructions are managed through this board and encoder
measurements are translated into odometry signals. To this
controller are connected additional sensors and devices like
MPU9250 sensor, quadrature encoders, infrared and
ultrasound sensors and motor drivers.
MPU-9250 Nine-Axis (Gyro + Accelerometer + Compass)
MEMS Motion Tracking Device. The MPU-9250 is a System
in Package (SiP) that combines two chips: the MPU-6500,
which contains a 3-axis gyroscope, a 3-axis accelerometer,
and an on-board Digital Motion Processor (DMP™) capable
of processing complex Motion Fusion algorithms; and the
AK8963, 3-axis digital compass.
In proposed system, we are using a P-CAN adapter to
communicate with our robotic arm. The PCAN-USB adapter
enables simple connection to CAN networks. The adapter
188 Denis Chikurtev et al. / IFAC PapersOnLine 52-25 (2019) 186–191
gives us USB connection with Full-Speed mode (compatible
with USB 1.1, USB 2.0, and USB 3.0) and Voltage supply
via USB. The P-CAN adapter may display reception,
transmission and error conditions states.
RPLIDAR A2 consists of a range scanner core and the
mechanical powering part which makes the core rotate at a
high speed. We can get the range scan data via the
communication interface of the RPLIDAR and control the
start, stop and rotating speed of the rotate motor via PWM.
Table 1. RPLIDAR Sample Point Data Information.
Data type Unit Description
Distance mm Current measured distance value
between the rotating core of the
RPLIDAR and the sampling point
Heading Degree Current heading angle of
measurement
Start Flag (Bool) Flag of a new scan
Checksum The Checksum of RPLIDAR return
data
Real Sense - The Intel RealSense Depth Camera uses stereo
vision to calculate depth. The D435 is a USB-powered depth
camera and consists of a pair of depth sensors, RGB sensor,
and infrared projector. We are using the RealSense as the
vision of the robot, for human and object recognition.
2.2 Description of the robot’s software
We are using the Ubuntu Operating System. Ubuntu is a
complete Linux operating system suitable for both desktop
and server use. Ubuntu includes thousands of pieces of
software, covering every standard desktop application from
word processing and spreadsheet applications to internet
access applications, web server software, email software,
programming languages and tools.
Robot Operating System (ROS) is a collection of software
frameworks for robot software development, providing
operating system-like functionality on a heterogeneous
computer cluster. ROS provides standard operating system
services such as hardware abstraction, low-level device
control, implementation of commonly used functionality,
message-passing between processes, and package
management (Koubâa, A et al., 2016). Running sets of ROS-
based processes are represented in a graph architecture where
processing takes place in nodes that may receive, post and
multiplex sensor, control, state, planning, actuator and other
messages. Despite the importance of reactivity and low
latency in robot control, ROS, itself, is not a real-time OS
(RTOS), though it is possible to integrate ROS with real-time
code (M. Quigley et al., 2009).
In order to understand how the ROS System works, we need
to have a high-level understanding of the ROS Framework.
ROS is based upon distributed computing with the “node” as
the basic computational entity. Each ROS system is
composed of one or more nodes. Nodes are useful because
they communicate with other nodes. Services provide node
with a client/server mechanism to communicate with another
node (Crick C, 2017). ROS nodes and packages are written in
C++ and Python programming languages. Each ROS node is
written using ROS client libraries such as roscpp and rospy.
Using client library APIs, we can implement different types
of communication methods in ROS nodes. Topics provide a
communication mechanism to send a message from one node
to many other nodes. The node that sends the message is
called the Publisher. The nodes that receive the message are
Subscribers to the Topic.
The nodes and the connections between them that we have
developed for this project are shown in the figure (fig.2). In
our case the node “rosbridge_websocket” is the bridge
between the ROS and external software. This node receives
the external massages by web user interface and publishes the
topics “cmd_vel” and “speech” to the other nodes. This
structure provides the options to send/receive a lot of topics
through rosbridge_websocket for remote control.
Figure 2. ROS nodes and topics.
3. DISCRIPTION OF THE PROPOSED
COMMUNICATION SYSTEM
Wireless communication is one the major concerns in
networked robotics, mainly in networked service robots.
However, different than wired communication, wireless is
usually less reliable and more interference prone. Thus, the
design of the wireless link and the wireless network is usually
more challenging (Kahar Saliyah et al., 2012). The design
space of a wireless communication link includes several
variables, such as frequency and modulation selection, power
and link-budget constraints, signal propagation
characteristics, a huge set of wireless communication
standards to choose from, and so on.
3.1 Model and description of the communication system
This paragraph describes the software architecture and the
principle of operation of the remote-control system for
service robots. The model of our system is shown in figure 4.
The system presented can be considered as a three-part
system - ROS processes, a web server and a web user
 Denis Chikurtev et al. / IFAC PapersOnLine 52-25 (2019) 186–191 189
interface. The ROS processes, along with the web server, are
executed on the robot's own computer. While the web user
interface can be run from any device through a browser.
The presented ROS nodes in Figure 3 can be many,
depending on the functions of the system. Some of these
nodes are for robot management, others are for
communication with the web server. The nodes we need to
consider are part of the rosbridge_suite package. This is the
basic packet that takes care of sending and receiving
messages to and from ROS. Rosbridge provides a JSON API
to ROS functionality for non-ROS programs. There are a
variety of front ends that interface with rosbridge, including a
WebSocket server for web browsers to interact with. In our
case we apply rosbridge_server for our system. Rosbridge
server creates a WebSocket connection and passes any JSON
messages from the WebSocket to rosbridge_library, so
rosbridge library can convert the JSON strings into ROS
calls. The reverse also happens, with rosbridge library
converting any ROS responses into JSON, then passing it to
rosbridge server to send over the WebSocket connection.
Figure 3. Structure of the developed communication system.
Communication system model which we are using is shown
above (fig.3). In order to access the robot over the Internet,
an additional server should be used to build a web page with
management features. This server connects to a
rosbridge_server, as well as launching the UI Web site. The
web server is based on Node.js API. Through Node.js we
configure the basic web server parameters such as address,
security settings, and so on.
The web user interfaces, which is the main tool for remote
control of the robot is based on the Python Django
Framework.
All libraries and frames needed to implement the user
interface are installed on the webserver. It is essential to
present the roslib library. It is the core JavaScript library for
interacting with ROS from the browser. It uses WebSockets
to connect with rosbridge and provides publishing,
subscribing, service calls, actionlib, TF, URDF parsing, and
other essential ROS functionality. The roslib library enables
the creation of functions similar to these in the ROS nodes,
but in the jQuery programming language. So, we can start
ROS topics from the web interface. One example for that is:
var cmdVel = new ROSLIB.Topic({
ros: ros,
name: '/cmd_vel',
messageType: 'geometry_msgs/Twist'
});
The code above creates new topic with name '/cmd_vel',
and message type 'geometry_msgs/Twist'. When we
have the topic, we can send or receive data over it. In this
way, by creating different topics and functions, we can use
them for controlling the robot or receive data from its sensors
and display them in the web UI.
3.2 Application of the Internet technologies in the system
The applied internet technologies in our system are described
below.
Communication between client computers and web servers is
done by sending HTTP Requests and receiving HTTP
Responses. HTTP is called a stateless protocol because each
command is executed independently, without any knowledge
of the commands that came before it. This shortcoming of
HTTP is being addressed in a number of new technologies,
including ActiveX, Java, JavaScript and cookies.
Django's primary goal is to ease the creation of complex,
database-driven websites. The framework emphasizes
reusability and "pluggability" of components, less code, low
coupling, rapid development, and the principle of don't repeat
yourself. Python is used throughout, even for settings files
and data models. Django also provides an optional
administrative create, read, update and delete interface that is
generated dynamically through introspection and configured
via admin models.
Node.js allows the creation of Web servers and networking
tools using JavaScript and a collection of "modules" that
handle various core functionality. Modules are provided for
file system I/O, networking (DNS, HTTP, TCP, TLS/SSL, or
UDP), binary data (buffers), cryptography functions, data
streams, and other core functions.
WebSocket is a protocol for creating a fast-two-way channel
between a web browser and a server. WebSocket overcomes
limitations with HTTP to allow for low latency
communications between a user and a web service.
Rosbridge is a package and API, which provide a JSON
interface to ROS so that non-ROS programmers and non-
ROS platforms can access and use ROS. The standard
implementation provides the JSON API via WebSockets,
which allows developers to interface with the ROS world
from web browsers, along with a very broad range of
ROS Topics are named buses over which nodes exchange
messages. Topics have anonymous publish/subscribe
semantics, which decouples the production of information
from its consumption. In general, nodes are not aware of who
190 Denis Chikurtev et al. / IFAC PapersOnLine 52-25 (2019) 186–191

they are communicating with. Instead, nodes that are 5. RESULTS

interested in data subscribe to the relevant topic; nodes that
generate data publish to the relevant topic. There can be First, we checked the network traffic and monitoring data
multiple publishers and subscribers to a topic. Topics are transfer. The data transfer between user PC and robot PC was
intended for unidirectional, streaming communication. Nodes measured and it was continuously around same MiB/s (fig.5).
that need to perform remote procedure calls, i.e. receive a The network traffic was stable during the test without any
response to a request, should use services instead. There is interruptions for several hours. In addition, we test the
also the Parameter Server for maintaining small amounts of hardware performance of robot PC and a user PC. The robot
state. PC use a low amount of his hardware resources but rises
network traffic (fig.6). The user PC shown both used of a lot
4. EXPERIMENTS of his hardware resources and network traffic performance
(fig.7).
To test our system, we used following experiments. We want
to check what traffic is going through the network, whether
there is a delay and interruptions while using the UI and the
successful communication between the UI and ROS nodes. In
addition, we measure the performance of the robot’s
computer and the user’s computer, in order to determine the
minimum requirement for the computer’s hardware.
First step is to launch all ROS packages as well as the web
server on the robot’s PC. Then, by a laptop or smartphone,
we load the user interface in random browser and start
moving the robot. In figure 4 is shown picture from the
WebUI. In the UI we receive video and sensor data by the
robot’s hardware and via the UI we send data for moving the
robot’s arm and mobile base.

Figure 6. Performance of the robot PC.

Figure 4. Web UI for remote control.

Figure 7. Performance of the user PC.

Table 2. Network response and latency.

File Response Duration Latency Type
time
Jquery.min.js 220ms 20ms 13ms Js
Main.js 452ms 36ms 28ms Js
Roslib.min.js 307ms 105ms 37ms Js
Figure 5. Measurement of the network traffic by Virtualjoystic 292ms 90ms 30ms Js
"Speedometer". k.js
 Denis Chikurtev et al. / IFAC PapersOnLine 52-25 (2019) 186–191 191
6. CONCLUSIONS
From the results we can conclude that the proposed system
works with minimal delay and without interruptions. The
main load on the network and the computers is due to the
large amount of data to transmit the video signal from the
robot camera. The other data that is exchanged over the
network is a small volume and almost no load on both the
network and the computers. All messages send from the UI
successfully goes through the web sockets and web server
and finally are received by the ROS nodes.
To reduce the load on the video channel, we need to reduce
the resolution and the number of frames per second. This will
also reduce the load on the user device when playing the
video.
A good advantage of the system is the low dataflow of the
ROS messages. This provide the opportunity to use as many
nodes as we need for the requirement of the user or the robot.
This structured architecture allows robust and reliable remote
control of service robots. For future work we plan to extend
our system by include the smart technologies and combine
them with the robot control and management.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
The research presented in this paper was supported by the
Bulgarian National Science Fund under the contract № DN
07/23 – 15.12.2016 “Telecontrolled Service Robots for
Increasing the Quality of Life of Elderly and Disabled” and
by contract № KP-06-М27/1 – 04.12.2019 “Research and
Development of Innovative, Intelligent Information and
Communication Technologies for Control of Service
Robots”. The work was partially supported by the Bulgarian
Ministry of Education and Science under the National
Research Programme “Young scientists and postdoctoral
students” approved by DCM # 577 / 17.08.2018.
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