Interfacing the Gryphon Robot with the World Wide Web

The field of robotics encloses mechanics, electronics, computer intelligent control and network communication technology. It has application in industry, exploration, public service and medicine. Through supervisory control modes, robotic system can be controlled from remote places and thus preventing the user from direct contact with hazardous and inaccessible environment. Moreover, with the development of computer network and the Internet, connectivity can be achieved to remote devices virtually anywhere in the world. Besides, distance education is becoming a widely used common way of teaching different disciplines (Khan, 1997). Along this line, in addition to introducing the field of robotics through the World Wide Web, this medium can be used as a link to program and control the Gryphon robot remotely. The motivation behind the development of this system was to develop a low cost implementation (You, 2001) to enable students to learn robotics, program and run the robot remotely with existing facilities at the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Mauritius. The proposed system (Mootien, 2003) is based on the client/server model, with a suitable front-end for viewing and interactive sessions with web users and a back-end relational database for storing and retrieving relevant information at the server side. A Web-based interface is also developed to enable online training of students on the programming and control of the robot. This chapter presents a detailed description of the work that has been carried out from the design to the implementation and application (use) of the system. The hardware and software technologies that have been used for implementing the system are Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Internet Information Services (IIS), VBScript, JavaScript and Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML), Microsoft Active Server Pages (ASP), Microsoft Access, Virtual Network Computing (VNC), Microsoft NetMeeting, WALLI3 for Windows and Creative Web Cam.