A Modular Distributed Telerobotic Client-Server System

Pervasive telerobotics aims at providing portable computer aided assistance using small, light, and highly interactive client-server telerobots. A reliable real-time multithreaded interface between a master arm and a slave arm is proposed using Distributed Components .NET Remoting. The advantages are (1) automatic handling of the network resources and transfer while isolating the components from network protocol issues, and (2) compiling into platform-independent bytecode. The functionalities of master and slave arms are independently designed. The operator maps his hand motion to the remote tool making abstraction of the structure of master and slave arms. Force feedback measured at the tool tip is transmitted and displayed on operator hand. Real-time streaming of stereo vision provides stereoscopic views of remote tool. Design and performance of proposed multi-threaded execution is presented to effectively realize multi-streaming of force, command, and stereo data in a distributed and modular framework.