Muscle-like control of entertainment robot over internet

The robot technology is extending to social activities such as community work, home-use and entertainment. By combining the robot technology with the popularized public Internet, it is anticipated a new application field will come out. However, Internet, as its nature, does not permit real-time communication among robots and other systems including human operators and computers. A different approach is necessary regarding communication protocols and robot control schemes. This paper proposes the combination of the Web services technology and the autonomous robot motion generation is the proper approach. For the motion generation, we introduce the muscle-like control method, which can be applied to any kinds of robots easily with proving a variety of creature-like motions. The method is applied to gait generation of a simulated four-legged robot, and the results show that it can transit from a motion to another one smoothly. In addition, the simulated robot is controlled by the Web services over Internet for investigating the feasibility of the proposed control scheme in a real network circumstance. The result shows that the proposed method provides us smooth control of the robot, even we have overhead of Web service processes and delayed communication