Effectiveness of IoT and VR for Real-Time Teleoperation of Industrial Robots

Abstract During the early stages of the Industry 4.0 era, teleoperation with human involvement in manufacturing processes and robot operation remained important. The existing teleoperation technologies have limitations in providing operator with spatial awareness and initiative control mechanism, making their applications difficult in tasks with high complexity and precision. This study implements the advancements from the Internet of Things (IoT) and Virtual Reality (VR) technology to improve the real-time teleoperation for industrial robots. The proposed design utilizes the benefits of the Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol in conjunction with a cloud broker, which has not been addressed significantly in previous studies for teleoperation. This setup enables the system to efficiently handle substantial amounts of data in short periods of time, allowing for an uninterrupted user experience while maintaining a consistent connection regardless of distance. Real-time robot control is accomplished by tracking the user's hand movements with a VR controller while providing the user with visual feedback from the VR environment. The incorporation of VR technology intends to improve the intuitiveness of controlling robot operations, provide more responsive feedback, and improve the quality of work performed by operators. Practical experiments are conducted with an industrial robot to observe the performance against the system under different internet conditions and different QoS setups. The evaluation criteria primarily concern latency and accuracy. The experiment aims to evaluate the effectiveness and scalability of the suggested system and to offer significant insight into its advantages and limitations relative to existing control system through systematic investigation.