WebRTC-based MOSR remote control of mobile manipulators

This article describes a contribution to the field of telerobotics via the Internet through the development of a web-based platform allowing the remote control of robots by multiple users, simultaneously. It also deals with minimizing the execution times of tasks by reducing connection and interaction delays. For this purpose, the Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC) technology is utilized. The developed remote manipulation system allows the operators to visualize the robot, its surroundings and the data incoming from its sensors, and to carry out basic tasks, either independently by the manipulator or by the mobile robot, or jointly by both mechanical sub-systems. In addition, to ensure the control of the remote robot by several operators simultaneously, a priority system managing parallel tasks and a chat system between the operators have been proposed. Besides, many teams are able to exploit the robot, concurrently. The WebRTC-based Multiple Operator Single Robot (MOSR) telerobotic platform is validated on the emulator of the RobuTER/ULM mobile manipulator through various scenarios of primitive tasks over the Internet.