RETROFIT: Reliable Exchanges through Resilient Overlays for Internet Teleoperation

Emergence of successful teleoperation applications requires the convergence of diverse domains like robotics, machine learning, sensing, actuation, control and communication. We envision these systems to be comprised of mobile robots with sensors and actuators, being continuously controlled over a communications network. Local intelligence at the robot would accomplish the sequence of short-term goals dynamically set forth by the remote controller. We believe that the Internet will serve as a highly useful communication infrastructure for such teleoperation, due to its ubiquitous nature and ease of access. In this paper, we propose techniques to achieve reliable low-latency communication through redundancy, over the existing Internet infrastructure. We present various techniques like multi-path forwarding, pro-active retransmissions, implicit data-fragmentation and proxy forwarding. These techniques help us characterize the design space of Internet communications along the dimensions of reliability and redundancy. We also present our preliminary experiences with these techniques through a case-study of remote vacuum cleaning using the iRobot Roomba.