"KhepOnTheWeb": An experimental demonstrator in telerobotics and virtual reality

Research in mobile robotics often requires heavy investments in time and money. Mobile robots are still quite expensive and complex. Moreover, experimental set-ups need important preparations. Despite the fact that the number of researchers using real robots is growing, a good robot is still an important investment that many research groups cannot afford. For those groups that can afford a such equipment, the comparison of the results with other researchers is quite impossible due to the impact of the environment and the type of robot on the results. The goal of our work is to make complex mobile robots and environments available from a computer network, like Internet or ATM, for instance. This remote access could help in doing less expensive experiments and comparative benchmarks on a unique set-up. This paper presents a first set-up installed on Internet and used to demonstrate some possibilities of remote control of a Khepera mobile robot. Moreover, a virtual reality model of this experimental set-up has been developed in order to allow distant experimenters to get familiar with the system and to prepare experiments in virtual reality before accessing the real robot. The observation of the first users and the feedback on the development give important indications about the usability and the relevance of such a new tool for mobile robotics.