Teleop connectivity

Validate each step in this document to determine if teleop will work with your operator and robot connectivity.

1. Twilio network test

UDP connectivity is required for Formant teleop.

Run the following test on both the operator computer and the robot computer:
https://networktest.twilio.com/

If everything is green, a connection can be established between the operator and robot over Formant teleop.

On restricted networks, often times "TURN UDP Connectivity" will fail, which means UDP traffic is being blocked somewhere along the line.

2. Bandwidth

Speed test

Determine the bandwidth up and down of both the operator and robot network using a speed test such as https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli

The largest bandwidth constraint is usually that the robot upload bandwidth must be greater than the bandwidth requirements of each robot -> operator stream.

This means your robot in the field has to have consistent bandwidth that it can use to stream a real-time video.

Video and point clouds dominate the upload bandwidth requirements. For video, this table approximates the upload requirements of a single video stream of a given quality:

A good rule of thumb is that the robot and operator should have a consistent 3Mbps connection in both directions, plus whatever the additional upload requirements of your video streams and point clouds are.

3. Ports and domains

Ports

• Allow TCP: 443, 3478
• Allow UDP: 443, 3478, 10000 - 20000

Domains

• Allow *.twilio.com
• Allow *.formant.io

Troubleshooting

Video issues

• Try decreasing the quality of the video to 360p
• See if the situation is improved using "Low bandwidth mode" in teleop settings
• If on a Jetson platform, try setting FORMANT_ACCELERATED_VIDEO_ENCODING=false in /var/lib/formant/.bashrc

Contact Formant support

If your issues persist, please contact Formant support in your shared Slack channel or via [email protected].