Internet based robots: applications, impacts, challenges and future directions

The Internet has ushered in the era of an exceedingly connected digital lifestyle. It has brought about a lot of changes in the social arena and has revolutionized the way we communicate with each other. Internet based teleoperation systems utilize the ubiquitous connectivity and low cost bandwidth offered by the Internet to send commands and receive supermedia feedback for teleoperating remote systems. Teleoperation systems have many myriad applications and impact areas ranging from education and entertainment to remote exploration and medicine. Such wide ranging applications of Internet based teleoperation systems have many social implications and a profound impact on the day-to-day human lifestyle. This paper tries to elaborate on the many application areas of Internet based teleoperation and further discusses the social implications of the same. Further, the paper discusses various technical challenges and research issues related to Internet based teleoperation systems and provides a few experimental results on some teleoperation systems implemented at the Robotics and Automation Laboratory at Michigan State University and the Communication and Robotics Laboratory at Oakland University.