Modeling and simulation of robotic tasks teleoperated through the Internet

According to their research activities, some laboratories have to set up expensive full-scale experiments requiring the use of teleoperated robots. In order to limit these costs, it is of interest to share the same equipment between laboratories and to teleoperate it directly from each laboratory through the Internet. In this context, we have initiated a study on a basic teleoperation scheme. Starting from experiments with a land mobile manipulator, we have built a generic simulation model that has been used to find improvements for later teleoperation experiments. The results presented in this paper are mainly based on simulations. However, they can be very useful for the real experiments we are currently preparing.