More and more robot automation applications have changed to wireless
communication, and network performance has a growing impact on robotic systems.
This study proposes a hardware-in-the-loop (HiL) simulation methodology for
connecting the simulated robot platform to real network devices. This project
seeks to provide robotic engineers and researchers with the capability to
experiment without heavily modifying the original controller and get more
realistic test results that correlate with actual network conditions. We
deployed this HiL simulation system in two common cases for
wireless-network-controlled robotic applications: (1) safe multi-robot
coordination for mobile robots, and (2) human-motion-based teleoperation for
manipulators. The HiL simulation system is deployed and tested under various
network conditions in all circumstances. The experiment results are analyzed
and compared with the previous simulation methods, demonstrating that the
proposed HiL simulation methodology can identify a more reliable communication
impact on robot systems.Comment: 6 pages, 11 figures, to appear in 48th Annual Conference of the
Industrial Electronics Society IECON 2022 Conferenc