KhepOnTheWeb: One Year of Access to a Mobile Robot on the Internet

Working in the field of mobile robotics, we are interested in sharing robots with other people via a network. In the 3 last years, there was already some work done mainly with robot arms but rarely with a mobile robot. In spring 1997, a first attempt was done with KhepOnTheWeb. Its purpose is only to demonstrate some possibilities of remote control of a Khepera mobile robot. It is accessible daily to everybody. After one year of access we performed an analysis of the log-files in order to understand the behaviour of the public in front of such an installation. This analysis was rather difficult because of the large amount of data involved. Specific software has been developed in order to extract the relevant information and to put it in a form that can be significative. Results show that people come mainly once and the few who return do it rapidly. The second visit is made on average after less than 15 days. Only a few of the visitors really operated the setup. During this year, another benchmark (TeleRoboLab) was built. It is reserved only to researchers and will be available at the end of 1998. It takes into account the results presented in this paper but adds a scientific dimension to telerobotics. This paper focuses on interface design, hardware and particularly on user behaviour. The robot is still accessible at: http://KhepOnTheWeb.epfl.ch/.