A Smart Multi Telepresence Robot Management System

Telepresence robot extends operation in remote locations. This feature can be beneficial for several applications, such as subsea exploration, telesurgery, remote physical presence, etc. Especially, the remote physical presence application will enable individuals with mobility limitations such as disabled veteran or police officer to perform regular duties through telepresence robots known as TeleBots. Certain scenarios require more than one TeleBot to operate in the same service area that needs many officers to control many TeleBots. Thus, we need an intelligent, fault tolerant management system to support these scenarios. This system needs to represent the relationship between the officers and TeleBots that can be 1:1, 1: many, or many:1. Also, it requires dynamic resource allocation such as communication bandwidth, battery power, spatial proximity, etc. In addition, the performance of the system can be affected by network failure, resource shortage, and dynamic changes in service demands and the status of all entities need to be monitored and appropriately reallocated for fault tolerance of the system. We propose a novel architecture that provides a fault tolerant multi telepresence robot Management System. This system will allow us to coordinate the assignment, scheduling, monitoring, and administrating multi telepresence robots and multi operators efficiently. In this paper, we present a novel architecture and implementation of the prototype system, and demonstrate the performance of the system. We analyze the trade-off between the service and resource allocation, and suggest an optimal approach based on case studies.