Analysis of WebSockets as the New Age Protocol for Remote Robot Tele-operation

This paper addresses the replacement of acknowledgement based protocols for teleoperation. The initial sections compare the currently used protocols like HTTP and TCP to WebSockets and examine the structural difference of using one over the other, for a real-time teleoperation scenario. A detailed analysis of HTTP and WebSockets is performed using live teleoperation by multiple users performing temporally seperated tests under variably delayed network conditions. The existing teleoperation laboratory at the University of Wuerzburg was used as the test bed to compare these protocols and final teleoperation results in terms of bandwidth, frame-rate, navigation efficiency and situational awareness are presented and discussed.