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. Many words encountered nowadays are prefixed by the letter "e" to reflect their close relation to the electronic world. Therefore, it was not surprising when researches and business started developing "e-services", which are simply services provided via the Internet. The use of robots has dramatically expanded the potential of e-services. Now 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 multi-operators in multi-sites are involved. This paper provides new theoretical and experimental results on these challenges. Specifically, multi-site 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.