Multi-site Internet-based cooperative control of robotic operations

The e-world, also known as the Internet, has added a new dimension to many of the traditional concepts in industrial applications and everyday life. The use of robots has dramatically expanded the potential of e-services. Individuals with particular expertise can perform highly accurate and fairly complicated tasks remotely via the Internet. This increase in the human reachability is faced by several obstacles. Reliable and efficient robot facilitated services via the Internet face several challenges. These range from human-computer interfacing and overcoming random time delay to task synchronization and human-robot interaction. These limitations intensify when many operators in many sites are involved. This paper provides new theoretical and experimental results on these challenges. Specifically, multisite cooperative control of an Internet based mobile manipulator is presented. The two main characteristics of this system are Internet based real-time closed loop control and coordinated operation. In addition, it is shown that despite random time delay the stability and synchronization of the system were achieved using event-based control