Telerobotics
Internet technologies bear the potential to reach a wide audience of users based on free software and desktop computers. But several challenges are raised to telerobotics as internet connections are low in bandwidth and insecure, and signals are unpredictably delayed.
Our institute took an active role in internet robotics with a special focus on three-dimensional virtual worlds, starting from the late 90's when VRML (virtual reality modelling language) as a 3D interface for the WWW (World Wide Web) came up. Internet based telerobotics systems have mainly been developed for applications in public outreach and education.
As a side effect internet robotics fostered awareness for cross platform availability of our software and promoted Java as the preferred programming language for user interfaces. Basic experiences had been gained developing the "VRML 2.0 KUKA Robot". It constitutes of a web-browser embedded interactive VRML model of a KUKA KR6 robot. The animation features of VRML 2.0 are used to realise forward and inverse kinematics of the robot. The VRML KUKA attracted high attention and had been decorated with the Multimedia Transfer Award and the Pirelli International Multimedia Award.
Based on similar technologies, a web-browser enabled interface for the MARCO teleoperation system was developed. It consists of three components: a MARCO teleoperation connection and user interface realised through a Java applet, a browser-embedded VRML model and an optional video link. This system has been used to present several of our space projects (e.g., ROTEX, ESS, GETEX, VITAL3). The current version now uses Java3D for three-dimensional visualization and the former jpeg video push stream has been replaced by a Real(TM) video system.
