On The Effects of The Variations In Network Characteristics In Cyber Physical Systems

The popular robotic simulator, Gazebo, lacks the feature of simulating the effects of control latency that would make it a fully-fledged cyber-physical system (CPS) simulator. The CPS that we address to measure is a robotic arm (UR5) controlled remotely with velocity commands. The main goal is to measure Quality of Control (QoC) related KPIs during various network conditions in a simulated environment. We propose a Gazebo plugin to make the above measurement feasible by making Gazebo capable to delay internal control and status messages and also to interface with external network simulators to derive even more advanced network effects. Our preliminary evaluation shows that there is certainly an effect on the behavior of the robotic arm with the introduced network latency in line with our expectations, but a more detailed further study is needed.