Physical agent system: concept and implementation

In this paper, we propose the concept of the PAS (physical agent system) and its implementation. The PAS is the tele-operated autonomous robot system that acts as AGENT, and is used to support human collaboration activities over distant places using robots. The PAS consists of the autonomous mobile robot equipped with a CCD-camera, a laser-pointer and an arm. The mobile robot is controlled by the distributed microprocessor system to allow flexible system configuration and adoption of various effectors and sensors. The camera and laser-pointer system is used as active vision system to measure the distance to the object pointed by the laser beam keeping the object in the view. The mobile robot is driven by crawler. It is equipped with ultra-sonic sensors and PSDs to detect obstacles around the robot along the directed path. Using these sensors, the mobile robot autonomously avoids the obstacles keeping the goal pointed by the laser beam. Another feature of the PAS is the system description using XML (extensible markup language) to achieve flexible configuration and to adopt various devices by defining functions and specifications of the subsystems such as effectors, sensors and operation devices.