A User Interface for Telecontrol of a Robot Over the Internet

Abstract

At the Intitue for Process and Production Control Technology of the Technical University of Clausthal, 'Usher', a user interface for 'Australia's Telerobot on the Web' (http://telerobot.mech.uwa.edu.au/) has been developed in the course of a Master's thesis. It overlays multiple monoscopic images of the robot's environment with a three-dimensional slick figure visualization of the robot's 5 degrees of freedom. The operator drags the elements of this visualization with a pointing device to obtain additional depth cues, measure size, location and orientation of objects, and to control the manipulator. This paper describes the interface design from a human-computer interaction perspective. The user interface design was developed by applying the ecological approach of visual perception to a data visualization of the 5 degrees of freedom. This leads to a simple stick-figure-like structure that can be used to specify a position in 3D space using only two-dimensional input devices. The user interface is implemented as a Java applet.