A telepresence wheelchair using cellular network infrastructure in outdoor environments

Abstract

Mobile wireless network technology has grown rapidly over the past decade with emerging applications and services. Particularly, the fourth generation (4G) cellular network has acted as a bridge between telecommunication technology and daily life applications. In this paper, we present an investigation into a telepresence wheelchair in outdoor environments employing cellular network infrastructure instead of using local wireless networks in indoor environments. Experiments were carried out to demonstrate remote interaction and control from a long distance and across countries. A large amount of communication data based on real network measurements was collected and analyzed to evaluate the system performance. The experimental results show that a wheelchair system can be controlled remotely in real-time with the acceptable round trip time of less than 400 ms. The results reveal the feasibility of using the 4G network for a telepresence wheelchair in healthcare applications.

A Telepresence Wheelchair with 360-Degree Vision Using WebRTC

“…The initial results of the first experiment (telepresence wheelchair based on WebRTC) show that the connection time of WebRTC is faster with less latency than the Skype platform. These results are entirely supported by previous studies [20,21,24] which demonstrated real-time telepresence. This result revealed that WebRTC processing is done at the user level, which reduces the delay in processing and connection time.…”

“…This result revealed that WebRTC processing is done at the user level, which reduces the delay in processing and connection time. Moreover, the transmission rate of WebRTC is able to adapt to the available bandwidth of the network, whereas Skype platform adjusts the video resolution to adapt to the network condition [20,21,24]. Similar findings were observed by another study reported in [25], which indicated that the WebRTC-based video conference system could perform well on the network less than 1 Mbps of bandwidth capacity.…”

“…Therefore, the video streaming rate of the proposed system has reached the standard of real-time video communication. Regarding the round-trip time, it is worth noting that the RTT of less than 400 ms is considered as real-time communications [20]. The RTTs of WebRTC between two browsers in the experiments are under the RTT threshold value.…”

Real-time WebRTC-based design for a telepresence wheelchair

“…Researchers have recently developed various prototypes for telepresence systems. Typical examples of such works included [1][2][3] in which the authors developed telepresence robots based on existing video conferencing platforms using Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) and Skype platform [1][2][3].…”

“…Our research group has recently demonstrated a telepresence wheelchair based on the Internet protocols and the Skype cross-platforms [3,7]. Our prior attempts have achieved some degrees of success in software and hardware development.…”