Remote presence: Long endurance robotic systems for routine inspection of offshore subsea oil &amp;amp; gas installations and marine renewable energy devices

Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing

et al. 2018

This work presents a detailed study, characterization, and measurement of video latency in a real-time video streaming application. The target application consists of an automatic control system in the form of a control station and the mini Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) equipped with a camera, which is controllable over local area network (LAN) and the Internet. Control signal transmission and feedback measurements to the operator usually impose real-time constraints on the network channel. Similarly, the video stream, which is required for the normal system control and maneuvering, imposes further strict requirements on the network in terms of bandwidth and latency. Based on these requirements, controlling the system in real time through a standard Internet connection is a challenging task. The measurement of important network parameters like availability, bandwidth, and latency has become mandatory for remotely controlling the system in real time. It is necessary to establish a methodology for the measurement of video and network latency to improve the real-time controllability and safety of the system as such measurement is not possible using existing solutions due to the following reasons: insufficient accuracy, relying on the Internet resources such as generic Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers, inability to obtain one-way delay measurement, and many solutions only having support for web cameras. Here, an efficient, reliable, and cost-effective methodology for the measurement of latency of a video stream over a LAN and the Internet is proposed. A dedicated stratum-1 NTP server is used and the necessary software needed for acquiring and measuring the latency of a video stream from a generic IP camera as well as integration into the existing ROV control software was developed. Here, by using the software and dedicated clock synchronization equipment (NTP server), it was found that normal video latencies in a LAN were in the range of 488ms -850ms, while latencies over the Internet were measured to be in the range of 558ms -1211ms. It is important to note that the values were obtained by using a generic (off-the-shelf) IP camera and they represent the actual latencies which might be experienced during control over long range and across international territory borders.

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Real‐Time Video Latency Measurement between a Robot and Its Remote Control Station: Causes and Mitigation

Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing

et al. 2018

“…A marine system, which pertains to IoVT and IoRT, used for IRM (inspection, repair and maintenance) of wind farms and other remote offshore structures, is used as the target application in this work. This system is developed by the CRIS (Centre for Robotics and Intelligent Systems) at the University of Limerick [13]. This developed system consists of a marine ROV, which is controllable remotely over the Internet and a control station.…”

Section: Problem Definitionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The analysis of latency (both video and network) is of great importance for systems with real-time constraints. The impact of latency on control systems is highlighted in [12,13]. Here, the technical, experimental and procedure details involved to develop the system are explained in detail to make reproducibility of the work easy for researchers in the field.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Real-Time Secure/Unsecure Video Latency Measurement/Analysis with FPGA-Based Bump-in-the-Wire Security

et al. 2019

Sensors

With the growth of the internet of things (IoT), many challenges like information security and privacy, interoperability/standard, and regulatory and legal issues are arising. This work focused on the information security issue, which is one of the primary challenges faced by connected systems that needs to be resolved without impairing system behaviour. Information, which is made available on the Internet by the things, varies from insensitive information (e.g., readings from outdoor temperature sensors) to extremely sensitive information (e.g., video stream from a camera) and needs to be secured over the Internet. Things which utilise cameras as a source of information pertain to a subclass of the IoT called IoVT (internet of video things). This paper presents secured and unsecured video latency measurement results over the Internet for a marine ROV (remotely operated vehicle). A LabVIEW field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs)-based bump-in-the-wire (BITW) secure core is used to provide an AES (advanced encryption standard)-enabled security feature on the video stream of an IoVT node (ROV equipped with a live-feed camera). The designed LabVIEW-based software architecture provides an option to enable/disable the AES encryption for the video transmission. The latency effects of embedding encryption on the stream with real-time constraints are measured and presented. It is found that the encryption mechanism used does not greatly influence the video feedback performance of the observed IoVT node, which is critical for real-time secure video communication for ROV remote control and piloting. The video latency measurement results are taken using 128, 256 and 512 bytes block lengths of AES for both H.264 and MJPEG encoding schemes transmitted over both TCP and UDP transmission protocols. The latency measurement is performed in two scenarios (i.e., with matching equipment and different equipment on either end of the transmission).

“…The AES core presented here is designed to provide secure communication between ROV and control station of marine application [15]. This marine application is developed to control a mini ROV through the Internet.…”

Section: Marine Applicationmentioning

confidence: 99%

An Efficient High Speed AES Implementation Using Traditional FPGA and LabVIEW FPGA Platforms

2018 International Conference on Cyber-Enabled Distributed Computing and Knowledge Discovery (CyberC)

et al. 2018

The LabVIEW FPGA platform is based on graphical programming approach, which makes easy the FPGA programming and the I/O interfacing. The LabVIEW FPGA significantly improves the design productivity and helps to reduce the time to market. On the other hand, traditional FPGA platform is helpful to get an efficient/optimized design by providing control over each bit using HDL programming languages. This work utilized traditional as well as LabVIEW FPGA platforms to get an optimized high speed design of AES (Advanced Encryption Standard). The AES is considered to be a secure and reliable cryptographic algorithm that is used worldwide to provide encryption services, which hide the information during communication over untrusted networks, like Internet. Here, AES core is proposed to secure the communication between ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) and control station in a marine environment; but this core can be fit in any other high speed electronic communications. This work provides encryption of 128-bytes, 256-bytes and 512-bytes set of inputs (individually and simultaneously) using a 128-bit key. In case of simultaneous implementation, all the above mentioned set of inputs is encrypted in parallel. This simultaneous implementation is resulted in throughput of Gbps range.