Web-based telerobotics system in virtual reality environment

The limitation for a web-based teleoperation system involves time delay in communication. Undesirable communication time delay causes system instabilities. Various techniques have been proposed to alleviate such control problems. This paper proposes an approach that develops a telerobotics system with a wireless web server/client application framework, which employs virtual reality technique to minimize the delay effects. A novel virtual tracker was developed, which acquires the real position and orientation of a mobile robot, and drives the virtual reality scene to display on the remote computer and change with the movements of a mobile robot. This requires only the robot position and orientation data, instead of transmission of the huge amount of video stream data from the robot to the client computer. As a result, the time delay effects can be ignored and system stability achieved. The experimental results have demonstrated the solution for teleoperation technology.