Super media enhanced internet-based robotics

Abstract

Internet has added a nlew dimension tal the human life. Once the extent of financial possibilities was revealed, Internet-based aipplications/services expanded to cover every aspect of our lives. A person can virtually trade, learn, play, control and do many other actions over the Internet. However, all Internet-based activities are still referred to as virtual since the experience is still far from being genuine. The. main difference between the virtual and real world is the quality of the human experience. This experience is impeded when the Internet is used because of limited human sensory interaction with the remote object and environment. This talk will present a new attempt to bridge the gap between the real and virtual worlds. This bridge will create the link that human senses need to be remotely coupled with the environment via Internet. The basic idea is to feedback sensory information available from the remote robot to the human operator in real-time. This sensory information can relate to any of the human senses: kctile, heat, visual and auditory. However, coupling the human with the remote environment via the Internet has many challenges. These challenges relate to human-machine interfacing, remote machine stability, operating eficiericy and safety. What create these challenges are the Internet characteristics such as delay, packet loss, and asynchronization. For instance the delay experienced over the Internet is random and nondeterministic with no simple stochastic model. This talk will present a general method for the modeling, control and analysis of real-time bilateral teleoperation systems via the Internet. This method results in a stable system in spite of the existence of nondeterministic time delay. It can also be applied to a wide range of systems with different environments, human operators, control commands, and supermedia (sensory information: video, audio, haptic, temperature and others) feedback. Several different experimental systems were developed and used to verify the theoretical results. The experiments include teleoperations between USA, Hong Kong, China and Japan. The videotape of the experiments will be shown in the talk.