Tele-Actor

Ken Goldberg and Dezhen Song et al. 
Credits and Contact Info.
<Summer 2000 ~ > 
ALPHA Lab, University of California, Berkeley. 
 


Abstract:

Internet-based "online robots" now provide public access to remote locations such as museums and laboratories. The Tele-Actor is a collaborative online teleoperation system for distance learning that allows many students to simultaneously share control of a single mobile resource. Our goal is to preserve the educational advantages of field trips without the drawbacks of group travel. We propose the Spatial Dynamic Voting (SDV) interface for Multiple Operator Single Robot (MOSR) teleoperation. The SDV collects, displays, and analyzes a sequence of spatial votes from multiple online operators at their Internet browsers. The votes drive the motion of a single mobile robot or human "Tele-Actor". See www.tele-actor.net for details.

 

System architecture

Users share control of the Tele-Actor from their Internet browsers. Communication is coordinated with the Tele-Actor Server located on a high bandwidth (T3) connection. The Server connects via a socket to the Local Basestation at the remote site. The Local Basestation and Local (human) Director communicate with the Tele-Actor via a wireless interface. As the Tele-Actor moves through the environment, video images are captured at the Local Basestation and streamed back to the Tele-Actor server for distribution as .jpg images to the remote voters. Voter responses are collected at the Tele-Actor server, displayed for all active voters and for the Local Director, who relays election results to the Tele-Actor via a wireless audio channel.

Spatial Dynamic Voting Interface

The Spatial Dynamic Voting interface facilitates interaction and collaboration among remote users. The SDV interface differs from multiple choice polling because it allows spatially and temporally continuous inputs. To facilitate user training and asynchronous testing, the Tele-Actor system is available in two modes. In Offline mode, all election images are from a prestored library. In online mode, election images are sampled from live video captured by the Tele-Actor. Both offline and online SDV modes have potential for collaborative education, testing, and training.

Field Tests:

Publications:

  • Collaborative Online Teleoperation with Spatial Dynamic Voting and a Human ``Tele-Actor'' K. Goldberg, D. Song, Y. Khor, D. Pescovitz, A. Levandowski, J. Himmelstein, J. Shih, A. Ho, E. Paulos, J. Donath, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, May 2002. [590K .pdf]

Media Coverage:

Acknowledge:

    This work was supported by the National Science Foundation under IIS-0113147.