Robust Visualization for Web-based Control of Mobile Robots

The World Wide Web provides a unique opportunity to connect robots to the Internet. Easy to use Web interfaces enable people all over the world to control mobile robots and to monitor their operation from the distance. Additionally, connecting a robot to the Internet offers distributed research groups the opportunity to perform joint experiments. In this context visualizing the robot’s actions plays a key role. In this paper we present different techniques designed to provide robust visualizations of Web-controlled mobile robots in dynamic environments. These techniques address two major drawbacks of the Internet, the limited bandwidth and the unreliability of connections resulting in packet loss. Our technique uses a 3Dmodel of the environment and visualizes the robot ́s actions using this model. It employs predictive simulation to bridge transmission gaps and applies probabilistic techniques to estimate the state of dynamic objects which influence the behavior of the robot. This way accurate visualizations of the actions of a mobile robot and of relevant aspects of its environment can be achieved.