Teleoperation of robots via the mobile communication networks

Internet-based teleoperation is becoming an important research field in robotics. Most of existing works employed the wired Internet or wireless local area network to transmit signals, which largely limited the movement of the robots. This paper presented a teleoperation project based upon mobile communication networks. Using mobile networks as the wireless transmission media free robots from space restriction, which is favorable for long distance and wide area tasks. But compared with the wired Internet, mobile network has much narrower bandwidth and thus is subject to longer random time-delays in data transfer, which leads to more difficult design of the controller. In despite of severe network environment, the stability of the system is guaranteed first. With information acquisition from multi sensors fixed on robots, bilateral teleoperation with real-time haptic and video feedback is provided. Especially a method has been developed to transfer smooth video stream in mobile networks based on experimental investigation and comparison of existing methods for real-time video transfer. The operator can control robots via various methods such as mobile handset, joystick, speech, etc. An experiment of robots formation was carried out to verify the efficiency of the proposed project