Book Contents  

The book offers a practical Internet telerobotic system for the target application: inexperienced Internet users can remotely control a wheeled mobile robot, which is able to perform some complex tasks autonomously or to interact with human operator in order to explore unknown and dynamic environments. Apart from for operating in hazardous environments that are traditional telerobotic areas, Internet telerobotics has opened up a new range of real-world applications, involving tele-manufacturing, tele-training, tele-surgery, museum guide, space exploration, disaster rescue, house cleaning, and health care. The system has to address the problems arising from data transmission over uncertain time-delay and unreliable Internet, teleoperation by inexperienced users, short of interactivity, and semi-autonomous robot navigation. The book will be useful to research scientists, practicing engineers, postgraduate/undergraduate students who wish to develop a successful intelligent application in telerobotic systems particularly for navigation in unknown and dynamic environments.

The first two chapters describe the background and research problems of Internet telerobotics, and review the related literatures. Chapter 3 implements a streaming technology based approach for video transmission. Chapter 4 proposes a framework of autonomous navigation using fuzzy logic. Chapter 5 proposes a new interactive teleoperation approach. Chapter 6 proposes a new map learning approach to model a priori unknown indoor environment. Chapter 7 proposes a new navigation method to navigate the robot to a given goal within an unknown environment with local minima. Chapter 8 evaluates the developed system.

About the author

Meng Wang received his M.Sc. degree in Computer Science from the Chinese Academy of Space Technology (CAST), Beijing, China, in 1999, and a Ph.D. degree in Artificial Intelligence from the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong, in 2006. He is currently associate professor at CAST. Since 1996 he has been with CAST, conducting research and engineering projects. He is an expert in the area of satellite ground applications, majoring in signal processing, automation, digital signal processor (DSP) embedding system, video compression and transmission, and database. He has served in several national satellite ground station projects, involving FY-2A, DFH-3, Resource no. 2, FY-2B, HY-1 satellites, as well as video wireless transmission system in the national plan. His current research interests include video compression and transmission, autonomous robot navigation, image-based pattern recognition, and system automation.

James Liu received the B.Sc. (Hons.) and M.Phil. degrees in mathematics and computational modeling from Murdoch University, Perth, Australia, in 1982 and 1987, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in artificial intelligence from La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia, in 1992. Currently, he is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computing at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he has been since 1994. He was a Computer Scientist with the Defense Signal Directorate in Australia from 1988 to 1990. He joined the Aeronautical Research Laboratory (ARL) of Defense Science and Technology Organization in Australia as a Research Scientist in 1990. At ARL, he helped perform AI research in areas of human factors and mission enhancement. He has published technical papers on subjects in expert system verification, forecasting systems, pattern recognition, biometrics technology, and e-Commerce applications. His research interests include telerobotics, intelligent business computing, multilingual system development, weather simulation and forecasting, data mining, and Web-based information systems.