A Test-Bed Internet Based Architecture Proposal for Benchmarking of Visual Servoing Techniques

Using the Internet to control and access real devices such as robots opens the door to new opportunities as the design of telelaboratories that permit the implementation of new algorithms using specific and detailed constrains. This is fundamental for designing benchmarks that allow the experiments to be made in a more scientific manner, taking into account that these experiments should be able to be reproduced in the future by other people under the same circumstances. This fact is fundamental to the implementation of new algorithms that can be compared with previous results from other scientific teams. The authors of this article consider that an interesting way to rapidly evaluate and benchmark a new robotic manipulation algorithm is by including into the system the possibility to upload Mat lab programs. This tool is normally used by the engineers for prototyping, including a huge set of already existing and standardized algorithms, some of them related to vision and robotic control. This paper presents the system architecture of an Internet robotic system that permits uploading a Mat lab algorithm to control a robotic arm/hand by means of visual servoing techniques. The system can specify a particular experiment with a set of initial states by using an XML representation, and evaluate the results by grasping a particular set of objects. Therefore, this system architecture presents the following challenges, firstly, to be used as a test-bed for visual servoing control applications, and secondly to benchmark these algorithms. At the moment of writing the system is under construction and the software and hardware architecture is being tested. Every component of the architecture is designed following high modularity principles, offering its services through the net. This permits to accomplish the requirements of the architecture: interchangable parts and two-target design, trying to minimize its complexity.