Analyzing the viability of Ethernet and UDP for robot control

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2021-07-23 02:00:05

Ethernet is the most pervasive communication standard in the world. However, it is often dismissed for robotics applications because of its presumed non-deterministic behavior. In this article, we show that in practice Ethernet can be made to be extremely deterministic and provide a flexible and reliable solution for robot communication.

The network topologies and traffic patterns used to control robotic systems exhibit different characteristics than those studied by traditional networking work that focuses on large, ad-hoc networks. Below we present results from a number of tests and benchmarks, involving over 100 million transmitted packets. Over the course of all of our tests no packets were dropped or received out of order.

One of the primary concerns that roboticists have when considering technologies for real-time control is the predictability of latency. The worst case latency tends to be more important than the overall throughput, so the possibility of latency spikes and packet loss in a communication standard represent significant red flags.

Much of the prevalent hesitance towards using Ethernet for real-time control originated in the early days of networking. Nodes used to communicate over a single shared media that employed a control method with random elements for arbitrating access (CSMA/CD). When two Frames collided during a transmission, the senders backed off for random timeouts and attempted to retransmit. After a number of failed attempts, frames could be dropped entirely. By connecting more nodes through Hubs the Collision Domain was extended further, resulting in more collisions and less predictable behavior.