Collaborative Teleoperation of Manipulation Tasks over the Internet using an Open, Component-based Architecture∗

The technological developments in distributed systems have led to new telerobotic applications, such as virtual laboratories and remote maintenance of complex equipment, built on top of Internet and distributed computing system infrastructures. These applications must satisfy both the general requirements of distributed computing, e.g. location transparency and interoperability, and the domain-specific requirements of reconfigurability, guaranteed performance, real-time operation, and cooperation among robots and sensory systems. Moreover, these applications must often support multiple participants, who require not only to monitor the system but also to collaborate and communicate each other to accomplish their goals. While sharing general requirements, software infrastructures for internet-based telerobotic systems – collaborative or not – are often strictly tuned to specific applications, thus preventing reuse of design and coding efforts. We have developed a CORBA-based software framework for telerobotic applications that takes advantage of Real-Time CORBA features to satisfy ∗Presented at ICRA 2004 Workshop on Wireless and Networked Robots, New Orleans, LA, USA, April 27, 2004