Viewing and controlling a mobile robot with common web technologies

Despite enthusiastic researches all over the world, completely autonomous robots are yet today an utopia. But pure Teleoperated Robotics System (TRS), as generally used in unknown or dangerous environment, have also their limitations and drawbacks. The introduction of a partial autonomy, where appropriate, could greatly enhance the performances of the man-machine systems. The Interactive Autonomy objective is to hide sophisticated systems behind simple interfaces and to transparently provide help to the user. These principles can be implemented to control a manipulation arm or a mobile vehicle. Telecontrol is generally associated with video images, nevertheless in specific applications or under special circumstances, the images have a poor quality, can be degraded when using the systems or are not available. This implies the introduction of a 3D model that can be used as stand alone or as augmented reality display. Existing Internet technologies can be used for interfacing the real and the virtual worlds. VRML provides the 3D aspects, Java is the unifying language between different computer systems, browsers and plugins are completing the team. Using these technologies we have developed a multi client/server application to remotely view and control a mobile robot. In this paper we give the description of this application and we provide a basic presentation of the tools.