Development and Experimentation of an Articulated Mechanical System using Internet

Abstract

Hostile environments such as nuclear sites are difficult for men to perform tasks safely. The objective of our work is to construct and test an experimental system of teleoperation oriented to the pick-and-place tasks, using Internet. Two PCs are used, one at the local site and the second at the remote site. The interconnection between these sites is based on the TCP/IP sockets. In the remote site; a webcam sends images manipulator arm through Internet to the control site where a human operator remotely monitors this robot in order to achieve pick-and-place tasks. The camera is horizontally and vertically adjustable. The robot and camera are both controlled remotely via the Internet. A human-centered design has been used to build up the graphical user interface. The task supervision is performed from a local site through an Internet interconnection TCP/IP protocol. The software is mainly written in Java while some low level functions are written with C. Some experiments were successfully realized in local area network, and remotely at a large distance via Internet. The obtained results encouraged us to test other control modes with our system as, mouse-click command, Image-Based Commands and Gesture commands. Therefore, the system can then be used and adapted for various industrial and medical applications. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.mech.24.4.19386