Collaborative Teleoperation on the Internet

Ken Goldberg, Billy Chen, and Rory Solomon
<August, 1999 ~ present>
ALPHA Lab, University of California, Berkeley.

Introduction:

We have created a system that allows a distributed group of users to simultaneously teleoperate an industrial robot arm via the Internet. A java applet at each client streams mouse motion vectors from up to 30 users; a server aggregates these inputs to produce a single control stream for the robot. Users receive visual feedback from a digital camera mounted above the robot arm. To our knowledge, this is the first collaboratively controlled robot on the Internet. To test it please visit: http://ouija.berkeley.edu/

Publications:

Collaborative Teleoperation on the Internet, Ken Goldberg, Steve Bui, Billy Chen, Bobak Farzin, Jacob Heitler, Derek Poon, Rory Solomon, and Gordon Smith), IEEE ICRA 2000. San Francisco, CA. April, 2000. [200K .pdf]
Collaborative Control of Robot Motion: Robustness to Error Ken Goldberg and Billy Chen, IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Robots and Systems, October 2001. [450K .pdf]

Media Coverage:

Acknowledgements:

Additional past collaborators on this project include: Steve Bui, Bobak Farzin, Jacob Heitler, Derek Poon, and Gordon Smith, without whom this project would not have acheived what it did. Special thanks must go to: Brian Carlisle, Gil Gershoni, Michael Idinopulous, Hiro Narita, Tiffany Shlain, Joan Sulaiman, and Heidi Zuckerman-Jacobson for their contributions to this project. Ouija 2000 was included at the Whitney Biennial in New York in Spring 2000 and is now archived at the Berkeley Art Museum.

Future Work:

We are currently working on simulations to confirm, in a more controlled environment, our hypothesized answers to some of the questions raised by the Ouija project.

Also, please visit our new project, the Tele-Actor: a participatory learning system where a skilled human equipped with wireless audio/video moves through and interacts with a remote environment. http://teleactor.berkeley.edu/