Research on and pure Java realization of a Web-based mobile robot system

The Web-based robot system results from acombination of the Web technology and the robot control technology. Most of the current Web-based robot systems are realized by integrating the client-side HTML and Java Applet with the server-side CGI. This kind of system is always dependent on a specific server platform and the efficiency is also reduced. This paper presents a new implementation of a Web-based robot system. With the use of pure Java, a Web-based mobile robot system composed of a HTTP server, an image server, a robot server and a data server, which provides Internet users with an interactive access to the WMR-1 type autonomous mobile robot developed in our lab, is implemented. For the distributed system composed of the HTTP server and the mobile robot, this paper presents a new application method, in which the Applet and the Servlet are combined and the Servlet acts as the client of the RMI or CORBA. The new method solves the problem that the popular Netscape and Explorer browsers support most Java characteristics but not the RMI and CORBA fully. It can be generalized to the application of multiple robot servers.