Activity at a distance: internet robots

In last decade the Internet has bloomed into the engine of communication with astounding impacts on both individuals and the society. Currently, however, the Internet is mainly used as a convenient and fast channel to exchange messages and obtain information from remote sources. With the rapid advance in underlying technologies, an entirely new paradigm lies just steps ahead- Internet robots , which allows people to remotely control a tool or a robotic system to complete tasks, which would otherwise be irrqossible to accomplish, over the Internet. This new scheme provides great potential and implication for a broad range of application areas as diverse as telemedicine, distance education, remote environment monitoring, remote crisis management, tele-manufacturing, housework assistance, military, entertainment etc. Physical interaction with remote environments over the Internet, however, poses many technical challenges which are still open. For example, new technologies are needed for coping with time-varying transmission delays, for dealing with variation in bandwidth, for ensuring trustworthiness (reliability, security and privacy), for handling unexpected situations and errors, for coordinating simultaneous users, etc. This talk will review these issues. In particular, we will introduce a new data streaming mechanism to facilitate the remote control of Internet robots.