Collaborative Control for Internet-based Multi-robot Exploration

The application of robots has been extended with the Internet to tele-robotics. Direct control and supervisory control, the two main tele-operation paradigms, are difficult to be carried out for the practical application in unknown dynamic real world due to lacking of collaboration between the interaction of the human operator and robots coordination. This paper presents novel collaborative control architecture. Multiple online robots can be accessed through any Java-enabled browsers. The collaboration between the remote operator and multiple robots determines the robots motions while taking account of the autonomy and coordination of individual robots. This paper applies the collaborative control to Internet-based multi-robot exploration. Some collaborative exploration strategies are presented, especially for the random time delay problem. Simulated experiments on multi-robot exploration are discussed. The experiment results show that the collaborative control paradigm is feasible and can improve the exploration efficiency for unknown dynamic environment with exerting the advantages of the interaction of the remote human operators and the autonomy and coordination of robots.