End-effector Pose Extrapolation using Wireless Channel State Information

Published

April 21, 2026

Author(s)

Karl Montgomery, Nathan Wei, Jing Geng, Mohamed Hany, Richard Candell

Abstract

Wireless communications for real-time control is an emerging field. There are many advantages gained by replacing a wired link with wireless; however, wireless brings unique challenges. Applications may need to be designed with wireless communications in mind, so they adapt in real-time to the state of the radio frequency (RF) channel. We present a real-time robotic use case that extrapolates end-effector poses by using wireless network quality indicators. We acquired the wireless channel state information (CSI) by polling the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) at a rate of 250 Hz. We demonstrate improvements to physical robot performance from the unique advantage of implementing a wireless co-design use case. The use case consists of two industrial robotic arms, the Leader and Follower robots, which coordinate to lift a metrology bar. The Follower senses when RSSI falls below a set threshold and extrapolates the next target pose. We conducted experiments with a dynamic, non-line-of-sight, multipath wireless channel by placing the station antennas and the access point inside a shielded and highly RF reflective reverberation chamber to emulate an industrial environment. We highlight the need for wireless control co-design to improve operational performance when presented with a challenging RF channel. Adopting wireless co-design may alleviate the strict communications reliability requirements often cited for industrial wireless networks and lead to greater adoption of the technology.

Conference Dates

April 21-24, 2026

Conference Location

Offenburg, DE

Conference Title

22nd International IEEE Conference on Factory Communication Systems (WFCS 2026)

Pub Type

Conferences

Download Paper

Local Download

Keywords

industrial Wireless, factory communications, wireless co-design, adaptive control, WLAN

Citation

Montgomery, K. , Wei, N. , Geng, J. , Hany, M. and Candell, R. (2026), End-effector Pose Extrapolation using Wireless Channel State Information, 22nd International IEEE Conference on Factory Communication Systems (WFCS 2026), Offenburg, DE, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=960590 (Accessed December 20, 2025)