UWA Telerobot
Encyclopedia
Development
The UWA telerobot is a historic landmark for the InternetInternet
The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...
and The University of Western Australia
University of Western Australia
The University of Western Australia was established by an Act of the Western Australian Parliament in February 1911, and began teaching students for the first time in 1913. It is the oldest university in the state of Western Australia and the only university in the state to be a member of the...
(UWA). It was the first teleoperable
Teleoperation
Teleoperation indicates operation of a machine at a distance. It is similar in meaning to the phrase "remote control" but is usually encountered in research, academic and technical environments...
industrial robot
Industrial robot
An industrial robot is defined by ISO as an automatically controlled, reprogrammable, multipurpose manipulator programmable in three or more axes...
made available for general use on the Internet in 1994. The UWA telerobot was originally developed as part of a PhD
PHD
PHD may refer to:*Ph.D., a doctorate of philosophy*Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*PHD finger, a protein sequence*PHD Mountain Software, an outdoor clothing and equipment company*PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
thesis by Dr Kenneth Taylor and was the subject of a later PhD by Dr Barney Dalton.
The first robot on the Internet, a plastic toy robot with only 2 degrees of freedom
Degrees of freedom (engineering)
In mechanics, degrees of freedom are the set of independent displacements and/or rotations that specify completely the displaced or deformed position and orientation of the body or system...
, was placed online by a team under Ken Goldberg
Ken Goldberg
Kenneth Y. Goldberg is a Professor of Industrial Engineering and OperationsResearch , with a joint appointment in Electrical Engineering and...
at the University of Southern California
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
only three weeks before the UWA
University of Western Australia
The University of Western Australia was established by an Act of the Western Australian Parliament in February 1911, and began teaching students for the first time in 1913. It is the oldest university in the state of Western Australia and the only university in the state to be a member of the...
team released their website. The USC
University of Southern California
The University of Southern California is a private, not-for-profit, nonsectarian, research university located in Los Angeles, California, United States. USC was founded in 1880, making it California's oldest private research university...
robot only lasted for seven months. The UWA robot is still online today, although the original robot was replaced in 1996 and the robot is no longer available for unrestricted public access, though interested parties can request permission.
Implementation
The current UWA telerobot is an ABBAsea Brown Boveri
ABB is a Swiss-Swedish multinational corporation headquartered in Zürich, Switzerland, and best known for its robotics. ABB operates mainly in the power and automation technology areas. It ranked 143rd in Forbes Ranking ....
IRB1400 model 6 DOF serial chain robot fitted with a pneumatic gripper attachment. The robot runs on a standard ABB S4 Robot Controller linked to a Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
server and which in turn communicates with a second server running ABB
Asea Brown Boveri
ABB is a Swiss-Swedish multinational corporation headquartered in Zürich, Switzerland, and best known for its robotics. ABB operates mainly in the power and automation technology areas. It ranked 143rd in Forbes Ranking ....
's RobComm software and a National Instruments
National Instruments
National Instruments Corporation, or NI , is an American company with over 5,000 employees and direct operations in 41 countries. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, it is a producer of automated test equipment and virtual instrumentation software...
Labview
LabVIEW
LabVIEW is a system design platform and development environment for a visual programming language from National Instruments. LabVIEW provides engineers and scientists with the tools needed to create and deploy measurement and control systems.The graphical language is named "G"...
application that was custom written for the task by Professor James Trevelyan with assistance from Perth
Perth, Western Australia
Perth is the capital and largest city of the Australian state of Western Australia and the fourth most populous city in Australia. The Perth metropolitan area has an estimated population of almost 1,700,000....
-based Icon Technologies and students. The robot forms part of the UWA telelabs project.
The Telerobot has undergone many changes to its control structure over time. Originally controlled via static html
HTML
HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....
web pages using CGI
Common Gateway Interface
The Common Gateway Interface is a standard method for web servers software to delegate the generation of web pages to executable files...
, work by Dalton saw the introduction of an augmented reality
Augmented reality
Augmented reality is a live, direct or indirect, view of a physical, real-world environment whose elements are augmented by computer-generated sensory input such as sound, video, graphics or GPS data. It is related to a more general concept called mediated reality, in which a view of reality is...
Java
Java (programming language)
Java is a programming language originally developed by James Gosling at Sun Microsystems and released in 1995 as a core component of Sun Microsystems' Java platform. The language derives much of its syntax from C and C++ but has a simpler object model and fewer low-level facilities...
-based interface that met with limited success. Control is currently by way of a downloadable LabVIEW
LabVIEW
LabVIEW is a system design platform and development environment for a visual programming language from National Instruments. LabVIEW provides engineers and scientists with the tools needed to create and deploy measurement and control systems.The graphical language is named "G"...
client
Client (computing)
A client is an application or system that accesses a service made available by a server. The server is often on another computer system, in which case the client accesses the service by way of a network....
application that incorporates real-time video streaming, with access control provided by the Telelabs system.
Current status
The robot continues to be the basis for research and group projects undertaken by MechatronicsMechatronics
Mechatronics is the combination of mechanical engineering, electronic engineering, computer engineering, software engineering, control engineering, and systems design engineering in order to design, and manufacture useful products. Mechatronics is a multidisciplinary field of engineering, that is...
Engineering
Engineering
Engineering is the discipline, art, skill and profession of acquiring and applying scientific, mathematical, economic, social, and practical knowledge, in order to design and build structures, machines, devices, systems, materials and processes that safely realize improvements to the lives of...
students and staff at UWA
University of Western Australia
The University of Western Australia was established by an Act of the Western Australian Parliament in February 1911, and began teaching students for the first time in 1913. It is the oldest university in the state of Western Australia and the only university in the state to be a member of the...
, Primarily involving the addition of new features or capabilities to the system. The robot is also used as a teaching aid for a course in mechanisms
Mechanism (engineering)
A mechanism is a device designed to transform input forces and movement into a desired set of output forces and movement. Mechanisms generally consist of moving components such as gears and gear trains, belt and chain drives, cam and follower mechanisms, and linkages as well as friction devices...
and multibody systems run by Winthrop Professor Karol Miller.