Building a real-time data distribution service (DDS) based network system for monitoring and teleoperation of autonomous vehicles

Abstract

With the advancement of computer technology, including computer perception, route planning, and robot control, and the development of communication technologies, including LTE, 5G, and networking middleware. Autonomous Driving is getting more attention from both the universities and industry. However, existing autonomous solutions still failed to resolve all corner cases. Therefore, assistive technologies are still crucial to autonomous driving system. Among these technologies, teleoperation is one of the important and promising techniques. Teleoperation system is a system which comprises multiple devices distributed across various geographical locations, requiring real-time data transmission among 8all the nodes. Therefore, high-performance networking middleware and an appropriate communication mode are crucial for overcoming those challenges. In the communication area, to achieve reliable and real-time data transmission in distributed real-time systems, the decoupled publish-subscribe communication mode is being widely used instead of the traditional server-client communication mode. And among various network middleware which can realize this publish-subscribe communication mode, Data Distribution Service (DDS) has the best performance. This dissertation is aimed to design a distributed teleoperation system which takes advantage of DDS to realize multi-devices' communication in real-time. By using API provided by RTI Connext DDS, three different programs have designed and implemented which realize the functions of the command center, the teleoperation stations, and the vehicles respectively. In the end, two sets of tests have implemented to verify the performance of this distributed system with five different combinations of all kinds of network environments. And the test results proved that the design of this distributed system based on DDS networking middleware is effective and successful in transmitting real-time data. By doing this project, a new idea which helps improving the communication quality in teleoperation area is provided.