Radio Degradation Challenge powered by CNI at the RoboCup Rescue World Championship 2024
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![Group photo of all participants of RoboCup Rescue 2024 in Eindhoven including CNI Researcher Manuel Patchou.](/storages/cni-etit/_processed_/a/d/csm_Robocup_Eindhoven_0937015829.png)
![CNI's vSTING employed by participating teams of RoboCup Rescue 2024.](/storages/cni-etit/_processed_/3/a/csm_RoboCup_Rescue_WC2024_b_f0321d97f8.png)
After last year’s successful introduction of CNI’s radio degradation unit vSTING, this year’s edition of RoboCup Rescue World Championship once more used it to provide network degradation in specific challenges.
vSTING was used to provide controlled network degradation to emulate the effects of real-world wireless communications on the competing robots while these completed tasks challenging their mobility, manoeuvring and dexterity abilities. The network degradation solution proposed by CNI was optionally integrated in 2 mobility challenges with a multiplier as a reward for completing teleoperation under suboptimal network conditions.
The network degradation provided by vSTING [1] allows the controlled application of network constraints such as additional latency, bandwidth reduction, and packet loss on a communication link to replicate network limitations that may arise during rescue missions in disaster scenarios.
The constraints used in the competition this year were based on the previous years’ experience to challenge the teleoperation ability of the robots with an additional latency of 100 ms and 20 ms jitter. From the 25 teams present, a bit more of a third took up the challenge and used vSTING from the preliminary round to the final. Just as last year, this gave the teams meaningful insights into the urgent optimization potential in the network communications of their setups but also revealed improvements in network resiliency of some teams since last year. Our cooperation with the RoboCup Rescue League to integrate network robustness into the championship is successfully being fulfilled.
RoboCup Rescue League Website: https://rrl.robocup.org/
Link to last year's news about RoboCup Rescue World Cup: [News]
[1] M. Patchou, J. Tiemann, C. Arendt, S. Böcker, C. Wietfeld, "Realtime Wireless Network Emulation for Evaluation of Teleoperated Mobile Robots", In IEEE International Conference on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR), Sevilla, Spain, November 2022. [pdf] [Code] [Details]