A robot graphic simulator for tele-operation

In tele-operation using robots, both the skills of an operator and the information about remote workplace are needed in order to perform given tasks successfully. But due to a communication delay and insufficient information about the remote workplace, it is difficult to perform some tasks in tele-operation. In order to solve these problems, graphics techniques in tele-operation have been studied. As the network technology has progressed, the dedicated communication lines of tele-operation have been replaced with the public communication networks such as the Internet. Experiments using the World Wide Web for tele-operation have been studied. In this paper, a graphic simulator is proposed and developed, which can be used to monitor robots in a remote workplace by using on-line simulation. In particular, it supports a network client/server model for tele-operations of robots. In the system, the sensor information are collected continuously and the event messages are generated according to each tele-operation. The generated event messages are transferred to the graphic workstation through the network by using the TCP/IP messaging and utilized to visualize the tele-operation. The dedicated communication protocols to transmit the information efficiently are developed. In order to do this, we classified several tele-operations and the developed protocols are used to transfer the event messages to the graphic workstation.