Technologies for Low-Bandwidth, High-Latency Unmanned Ground Vehicle Control

The proposed work will develop and demonstrate a novel approach that allows robust command and control of robotic systems when there is communications latency, limited bandwidth and dramatically changing bandwidth throughout the course of a mission. The goal is to significantly increase the reliability and safety of a wide variety of robot operations by creating a control and communication scheme that adapts to available bandwidth and explicitly handles uncertainty regarding positioning and timing at a system level. The novel aspect is that the entire system control architecture including visualization, tasking, robot behavior and messaging will be designed to adapt to huge changes in the availability and rate of communication. Both the function of semi-autonomous robot behavior and operator visualization and tasking will be explicitly influenced by the current bandwidth and timing issues associated with computing, communication and perception. To prove the adaptability of our solution, we will use several different military robots we already have in house together with a novel software defined radio from Freewave designed to allow the greatest possible range of communication bandwidth (adaptive data rates up to 200Mbps) and latency (<5ms to>10s).