Remote programming of an Internet tele-lab for learning visual servoing techniques: a case study

Since 2001 we are using the UJI-TeleLab as a tool to allow students and scientist of our robotics laboratory to program remotely several vision-based Internet robots. During this period we are learning that remote programming combined with an advanced multimedia user interface for remote control is very convenient, flexible and profitable for the design of a tele-laboratory. The system architecture permits to any external program to have access to almost every feature of the already existing ''UJI online robot" (i.e. cameras, object recognition, robot control, etc.) [R. Marin et al., 2003]. We present two visual servoing experiments that have been programmed remotely over the tele-lab. They show which conditions of Internet latencies and bandwidth are appropriate for the visual servoing loop. We must take into account that the real images are taken from the remote robot scenario and the experiment algorithm is executed from the client side at the user place.