Internet based robotic tele presence

Acknowledgments First of all, I wish to thank my advisor Armin B. Cremers for his guidance, encouragement, and patience. I thank Wolfram Burgard for his willingness to be the co-referent. I am grateful to both of them for offering me the opportunity to work on the Robotic Tele-Presence Lab (RTL) Project, a part of KI-NRW/Virtual Knowledge Factory, headed by Armin B. Cremers and Wolfram Burgard, which inspired me to this thesis in the first place. Several other people contributed to this thesis as well. Let me start with Dieter Fox who made many valuable suggestions which helped to improve this work a lot. Next, I would like to thank all the other current and former members of the " RHINO team " , and especially Thrun for the joyful working atmosphere over the years and for providing the framework necessary to evaluate my ideas. Note: The footer of the even numbered pages and of the odd numbered pages show two sequences of still images illustrating the performance of the tracking algorithm introduced in Chapter 3. The reader may browse through the pages in flip-book style, to get a slight impression of the quality of the visualizations achieved with the methods proposed in this thesis. Introduction The emergence of the World Wide Web provides a unique opportunity to connect mobile robots to the Internet, enabling people all over the World to control them and monitor their operation. The vision behind such endeavors ranges from relatively simple Web-based inspections and surveillance applications, to highly versatile applications that use robots connected to the Web to establish a remote " tele-presence " in dynamic and populated environments. In this thesis we look at techniques for the development of control interfaces for such Internet-based tele-presence systems. Internet-based tele-control differs from conventional tele-operation in several aspects: • The delay and the throughput of the Internet are highly unpredictable. Variations by several orders of magnitude are not uncommon. Traditional tele-operation systems typically assume fixed and guaranteed delays and throughput rates. With communication as unpredictable as it is on the Internet, autonomy plays an important for Internet-controlled robots. The robot's control system must ensure " safe " operation even if communication breaks down. More desirable, however, are interfaces that enable Internet users to control a robot sensibly even if the communication is highly unreliable. • Web users typically lack the technical education and skill required by most existing …