Teleoperated Locomotion for Biobot between Japan and Bangladesh

Abstract

Biobot-based insects have been investigated so far for various applications such as search and rescue operations, environmental monitoring, and discovering the environment. These applications need a strong international collaboration to complete the tasks. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, most people could not easily move from one country to another because of the travel ban. In addition, controlling biobots is challenging because only experts can operate the cockroach behavior with and without stimulated response. In order to solve this issue, we proposed a user-friendly teleoperation user interface (UI) to monitor and control the biobot between Japan and Bangladesh without onsite operation by experts. This study applied Madagascar hissing cockroaches (MHC) as a biobot hybrid robot. A multithreading algorithm was implemented to run multiple parallel computations concurrently on the UI. Virtual network computing (VNC) was implemented on the teleoperation UI as remote communication for streaming real-time video from Japan to Bangladesh and sending remote commands from Bangladesh to Japan. In the experiments, a remote operator successfully steered the biobot to follow a predetermined path through a developed teleoperation UI with a time delay of 275 ms. The proposed interactive and intuitive UI enables a promising and reliable system for teleoperated biobots between two remote countries.