Establishing multimodal telepresence sessions using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) and advanced haptic codecs

In telepresence and telemanipulation systems, multimodal data is exchanged over a network allowing humans to experience and to operate in remote or inaccessible environments. To operate over the global Internet and connect to multiple telepresence systems, a flexible framework for initiating, handling and terminating Internet-based telerobotic sessions becomes necessary. In this work, we explore the use of standard Internet session and transport protocols in the context of telerobotic applications. Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) is widely used to handle multimedia teleconference sessions with audio, video or text, and provides many services advantageous for establishing connections between heterogeneous haptic interfaces and telerobotic systems. We apply the session paradigm to the creation and negotiation of haptic telepresence sessions and propose to extend this framework to work with the haptic modality. The notion of a ¿haptic codec¿ is introduced for transforming haptic data into a common format, applying data reduction or compression techniques and implementing teleoperation control architectures. The use of the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) is explored for transport of teleoperation data. Finally, a prototype and demonstrator system is presented for evaluation of the proposed framework.