Teleoperations at Scale: How Polymath Robotics Uses LiveKit to Remotely Operate Heavy Machinery
Polymath Robotics builds autonomy solutions for off-highway robots and heavy machinery around the globe and across industries like agriculture, mining, and logistics. Their platform offers programs for point-to-point navigation, obstacle detection, geofencing, and more.
Robots rely on a variety of sensors, and cameras are especially critical for remote monitoring and operations. However, video streaming is bandwidth intensive and industrial robots often operate in environments with unreliable network connectivity, from crop fields and shipping ports to open mines and dense forests. Ensuring video data is reliably transmitted from robots to screens is essential for day-to-day operations.
Polyglot is a tool that the Polymath team and their customers use on a daily basis. It allows users to access and monitor their fleet of autonomous vehicles and watch live camera feeds to see what a robot is doing, where it’s going, and whether it’s going to hit an obstacle. It also gives operators controls to remotely redirect vehicles and make emergency stops if needed.
Polymath knew that in order to provide really performant teleoperations, low-latency video streaming had to be a core capability of the platform. The team initially tried other tools, but struggled with laggy videos, unbounded memory usage on robots, and limited technical support.
“Industrial robots often operate in network-constrained environments. Being able to visualize bitrate and end-to-end latency for sensor data is critical for improving performance.”
Troy Gibb, Staff Robotics Software Engineer
When the team discovered LiveKit, they immediately knew it was the right solution. LiveKit’s open source media server offered streaming over WebRTC, multi-language SDK support, and a React library with ready-to-go frontend components. Polymath knew it would take a lot of work to build their own solution for efficient media transport and was happy to leave the network infrastructure management and optimization to LiveKit Cloud.
“For robots that need highly responsive teleops, we’re looking at probably sub-100ms latency and at least 30 frames per second. LiveKit solved 80% of the latency problem right out of the box.”
Troy Gibb, Staff Robotics Software Engineer
Improving performance is an ongoing priority, and Polymath continues to look for ways to optimize end-to-end latency to provide their customers with a best-in-class platform. The team is particularly interested in LiveKit’s investment on hardware acceleration, as robots usually have powerful graphics cards that can be used to further optimize video streaming, and more detailed metrics for visualizing performance.
“LiveKit is a great product with a great team. We’ve been really happy partnering with them on our robotics platform.”
Ilia Baranov, Co-Founder & CTO