Development of a multibehavior-based mobile robot for remote supervisory control through the Internet

Internet-based robotic systems have received much attention in the past years. In this paper, we review the networked mobile robot systems and suggest taxonomy based on the three levels of control commands. The performance analysis result shows that direct control has potential difficulty for implementation due to the unpredicted transmission delay of the network. To attack this problem, we have suggested the behavior-programming control concept to avoid disturbances of the Internet latency. For this purpose, primitive local intelligence of the mobile robot is grouped into motion planner, motion executor, and motion assistant, where each of a group is treated as an agent. They are integrated by centralized control architecture based on multiagent concept, communicated through a center information memory. The event-driven concept is applied on the robot to switch the behaviors to accommodate the unpredicted mission autonomously. We have successfully demonstrated experimentally the feasibility and reliability for system through a performance comparison with direct remote control. The behavior-programming control of the networked robot can be extended to explore the unknown environment and to perform remote learning through linguistic interaction.