A web-based teleoperative mobile robotic system : Master of Engineering in Information Engineering at Massey University, Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

With the rapid development of internet technology, it becomes real that human beings can access, modify and control a remote hardware device via internet connection. Such remote operations can replace the human to be present at a dangerous or unreachable place or can make as many as possible users to access the hardware in different places at a low cost. The thesis research was aimed at developing a web based mobile robot control framework for education purpose. It should be composed of a mobile robot. Http server, dynamic user interface and video server. With it users can view and control the real robot via a normal web browser and can choose to run either simulation or the real robot. This is done by setting up operational parameters via a friendly GUI (graphic user interface). Users also can upload and compile their own C code to control the robot and get back the running results. The main objectives of this thesis research are hardware upgrading for Nomadic Super Scout mobile robot and web based php programming. For the first objective, the onboard PC was replaced by a laptop that is remotely placed and connected to the robot control system via Bluetooth wireless. The Nserver for robot simulation was set up in the Linux operating environment. For the second objective, the software programming was focused on building a web control platform which should be user friendly. An Apache server was developed where PHP program was used for the user interface. The main advantage of using PHP is that it does not need to install or download any software or script to get access to the remote robot via a normal web browser on any operation like windows or Linux. The web-based mobile robot system was tested using two different cases. One case demonstrated how the user specifies a set of motion parameters of the robot that is programmed to perform a wall-following behaviour. The other demonstrated how the user uploads a collision avoidance program to run the robot that is placed among obstacles. Both case studies were performed in real environments and the results proved the success of the developed web-based robotic system

System engineering techniques for establishing balanced design and performance guidelines for the advanced telerobotic testbed

Novel system engineering techniques have been developed and applied to establishing structured design and performance objectives for the Telerobotics Testbed that reduce technical risk while still allowing the testbed to demonstrate an advancement in state-of-the-art robotic technologies. To estblish the appropriate tradeoff structure and balance of technology performance against technical risk, an analytical data base was developed which drew on: (1) automation/robot-technology availability projections, (2) typical or potential application mission task sets, (3) performance simulations, (4) project schedule constraints, and (5) project funding constraints. Design tradeoffs and configuration/performance iterations were conducted by comparing feasible technology/task set configurations against schedule/budget constraints as well as original program target technology objectives. The final system configuration, task set, and technology set reflected a balanced advancement in state-of-the-art robotic technologies, while meeting programmatic objectives and schedule/cost constraints

Telerobotics : methodology for the development of a through-the-internet robotic teleoperated system

This work presents a methodology for the development of Teleoperated Robotic Systems through the Internet. Initially, it is presented a bibliographical review of the Telerobotic systems that uses Internet as way of control. The methodology is implemented and tested through the development of two systems. The first is a manipulator with two degrees of freedom commanded remotely through the Internet denominated RobWebCam (http://www.graco.unb.br/robwebcam). The second is a system which teleoperates an ABB (Asea Brown Boveri) Industrial Robot of six degrees of freedom denominated RobWebLink (http://webrobot.graco.unb.br). RobWebCam is composed of a manipulator with two degrees of freedom, a video camera, Internet, computers and communication driver between the manipulator and the Unix system; and RobWebLink composed of the same components plus the Industrial Robot. With the use of this technology, it is possible to move far distant positioning objects minimizing transport costs, materials and people; acting in real time in the process that is wanted to be controller. This work demonstrates that the teleoperating via Internet of robotic systems and other equipments is viable, in spite of using rate transmission data with low bandwidth. Possible applications include remote surveillance, control and remote diagnosis and maintenance of machines and equipments

Robot swarming applications

This paper discusses the different modes of operation of a swarm of robots: (i) non-communicative swarming, (ii) communicative swarming, (iii) networking, (iv) olfactory-based navigation and (v) assistive swarming. I briefly present the state of the art in swarming and outline the major techniques applied for each mode of operation and discuss the related problems and expected results