A study on the teleoperation of robot systems via WWW

We describe a study on a teleoperated robot control system developed in the ART (Advanced Robotics and Teleoperation) Lab. at the University of Alberta. When using the system, a remote operator just needs a general-purpose computer with Internet connection and a World Wide Web (WWW) browser to remotely operate the robot through the Internet. A control architecture that combines computer and robot is constructed. This system is divided into two primary parts, the client part, which is executed on the remote operator's computer, and the server part, which resides on the server workstation in the ART Lab. The two parts are connected via the Internet. A graphical interface on the remote computer screen, showing the robot and its environment, enables the remote operator to send control commands to the robot. Communication coordination between the client and the server is developed using Java language. Since the real-time control through the Internet typically suffers from random time-delay and bandwidth constraints, many traditional control methods will suffer from stability and obstacle avoidance related issues. One approach to deal with the mentioned problems is to use event-based control methods for planning and control which have been successful in reducing the effects of the constraints by adopting a nontime based reference system in the control algorithm. We will apply this method in our Internet-based telerobotic systems. The nontime referenced action control scheme is used to deal with the unpredictable time-delays.