Experimentation is a very important part of education in engineering including mechatronics engineering, which is a relatively new field, combining three engineering disciplines: mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and software engineering. The equipments needed for experiments in mechatronics are usually expensive. A solution to make these expensive equipments achievable is to share them with other universities or research centers from different locations in the world.
The goal of our team is to build a networked telerobot system so that the Internet users, especially researchers and students, can be able to control an autonomous robot able to explore a dynamic environment remotely from their home and share the robot system with the department. The particularity of the environment, in this case, is that the experiment uses grid lines painted on the floor, for robot navigation purpose.
The system which is still under development will be able to increase the number of robots. The communication software technologies are based on PHP. A specific protocol over IP was designed for communication between the server and clients.
The aim of this project is oriented toward providing a telerobot system with a high degree of local intelligence in order to overcome restricted bandwidth and transmission delay of the network.
