Evaluating the Impact of Mobile Network Quality on Robot Teleoperation Using a Remote Experience Center

Inhalt:
The rapid development of mobile networks opens new possibilities for collaborative robotics, particularly teleoperation, which requires highly reliable communication with lowlatency. Nevertheless, researchers often face challenges due to limited cross-disciplinary expertise and restricted access to experimental infrastructure, such as advanced robotic platforms and 5G/6G testbeds. To address the fragmentation in teleoperation research, we present a modular experimental framework with graphical user interface (GUI), labeled as the Remote Experience Center (REC), which enables real-time robotic control over software-defined mobile networks. The REC integrates a mobile network testbed deployed in Prague with a robotic platform located in Munich. We demonstrate capabilities of the REC through a pick-and-place task involving human control with visual and force feedback. To improve safety and accessibility, the REC includes not only real hardware, but also digital twin of both the robotic system and the mobile network. Through real-world experiments, we investigate the impact of key mobile network parameters and characteristics, such as modulation and coding scheme (MCS), communication delay, and jitter, on user experience and system responsiveness. The experimental results reveal that increasing communication delay and jitter, as well as decreasing MCS, negatively affect the conditions for performing teleoperation tasks over a mobile network.