Compliant control and software agents for Internet robotics

This paper describes the architectural principles of a distributed agent-based platform for the remote supervision of robotic manipulation tasks. The main contributions are that real-time constraints can be encapsulated within the local robotic controller through methods of compliant control, and that such a low-level API (application program interface) is the foundation for distributed applications that are evolvable, survivable, and can guarantee stability and compliance even in the presence of failures and lack of QoS (quality of service) provisioning. We discuss our experience with a prototype implementation and outline future research directions.