Holistic Modeling and Control of Mobile Robot Applications within 5G O-RAN Networks

Navigating mobile robots from remote servers offers numerous benefits in industrial settings, such as centralized decision-making and powerful hardware availability. However, the QoS of outsourced controllers is heavily influenced by the communication infrastructure state. Allowing robot applications to gain insights and control these states has the potential to significantly enhance mission performance. Programmable 5G O-RAN standardized near real-time network controllers allow application domain entities to access network-specific metrics and control parameters. We propose a solution where multiple robots are connected via 5G O-RAN to a common robot application framework capable of forwarding network performance metrics and managing network resource usage. This new component allows mobile robot applications to optimize their behavior based on network conditions. The system is evaluated in a simulated environment, where necessary navigation computations can be performed either on the mobile robot's local hardware or on more powerful remote hardware. Results demonstrate enhanced mission performance in the case of network-aware navigation and further improvements when the agent's QoS is prioritized.