Sensor network assisted teleoperation

Rapid advances in the field of sensing and sensor networks is opening the door to many new possibilities. This paper presents work related to interfacing a robot being controlled remotely via the Internet with a sensor network. The sensor network measurements are fed back to the operator and rendered in the form of a haptic force. This provides the operator with information regarding the environment and thus more efficient and safe operation. The challenge is to efficiently fuse the measurements from the different nodes and convey the result to the operator in an intuitive form. A centralized approach and a distributed approach for the fusion of sensed measurements are presented. In addition, experimental results are provided to highlight the concepts developed