Towards Critical Industrial Wireless Control: Prototype Implementation and Experimental Evaluation on URLLC

Ultra reliable low latency communication (URLLC) is a promising technology to enable critical industrial wireless control, such as tactile sensing and motion control. This article presents a novel software-defined URLLC prototype and establishes a human-in-loop robotic teleoperation platform for experimental evaluations. First, by studying the control and communication requirements of robotic teleoperation, the key challenges for URLLC-based industrial wireless control are analyzed. Then, the prototype development including protocol stack and hardware architecture design is introduced in detail, and extensive experiments are performed to evaluate the communication latency and control transparency for robotic teleoperation. Experimental results show that the prototype can realize millisecond-level latency with ultra-high reliability, and support wireless teleoperation with similar transparency as wired teleoperation. Finally, challenges and future research issues towards 6G are discussed.