Wireless Time Sensitive Networking Impact on an Industrial Collaborative Robotic Workcell

In this article, we describe a methodology and associated models to evaluate a time sensitive collaborative robotics application enabled by wireless time sensitive networking (WTSN) capabilities. We also present a method to configure WTSN scheduling to meet the application time budget and validate it in a realistic industrial use case. We detail the methodologies for implementing and characterizing the performance of key WTSN capabilities, namely time synchronization and time-aware scheduling, over an IEEE 802.11 based network. We deploy the WTSN capabilities with a collaborative robotic workcell consisting of two robotic arms, which emulate a material handling application, known as machine tending. We further explore configurations and measurement methodologies to characterize application performance of this use case and correlate it to the performance of the wireless network.