In this thesis, an internet-based personal robot system with tele-presence is designed and developed based on WWW. Also we propose a concrete concept of a personal robot and its hardware system. For the real-time control via the internet, a novel control architecture which is robust to the internet time delay is proposed.
The personal robot considered in this thesis is a kind of service robots which can be used for a person's convenience in the house or office. It has a wireless LAN system for the internet remote control. Users via the internet can control the personal robot in a remote site as if they were near the robot at a local site.
A prototype of the personal robot has two AC motors, a Pentium II 333MHz personal computer, two cameras and 10 sonars. It has a LCD monitor, a speaker and a microphone to communicate with the operator. It can also be used to implement tele-presence.
In order to control the personal robot without the influence of the internet time delay, a novel internet control architecture is designed. This architecture guarantees that the robot can avoid obstacles. It can reduce the path error and the time difference between the virtual robot in a local site and the real robot in a remote site. The results of experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and applicability of the proposed internet control architecture.
