Teleoperating mobile robots via VDA 5050 - a first middleware evaluation within open industrial networks

Teleoperation is a practical fallback for mobile robots in intralogistics when rare but safety- and throughputcritical edge cases exceed autonomous capabilities. While Fleet Management Systems (FMSs) increasingly rely on vendor-neutral interfaces such as VDA 5050 to coordinate heterogeneous robots, teleoperation is not natively represented in the standard and is typically implemented as an ad hoc, robot-specific add-on. This paper closes this gap by proposing a VDA 5050 teleoperation extension that enables human-in-the-loop control as part of the same interface used for autonomous task and route coordination. To facilitate reproducible evaluation, we further contribute a configurable VDA 5050 traffic generator that reproduces realistic message patterns for middleware-based FMS communication. Employing the Open Radio Access Network (Open RAN) concept, cellular 5G and future 6G networks can be flexibly deployed in industrial environments to provide reliable, low-latency wireless connectivity for mobile robot teleoperation. Using an end-to-end stack consisting of VDA 5050 messaging, middleware transport, and Open RAN wireless link, we evaluate latency and communication overhead to characterize the performance implications of standardized teleoperation integration.

Subjects

Mobile robots

Open RAN

Robots

Streams

Videos

Printing

Middleware

Streaming media

Timing

Generators

DDC Class

629.892: Robot

004: Computer Sciences

Options

Teleoperating mobile robots via VDA 5050 - a first middleware evaluation within open industrial networks