Web-based tele-operation of Internet-accessible devices

Abstract

Tele-operation systems have been extensively applied in industrial automation, space exploration, tele-robotics for hazardous environment, on-line laboratories, smart homes, tele-medicine, military service, tele-education and our daily life. Various control channels have been used for tele-operation systems, such as radio, microwave, Internet etc. The Internet is now broadly used in our daily life, for applications such as FTP, Telnet, Web browsing, e-mail etc. As a consequence, it is natural that the Internet is used to control tele-operated devices, and the use will increase in the future. In the past few years, many researchers have been using the Internet as a command transmission medium to control the tele-operated devices and obtain feedback signals. Recently, there is an emerging trend towards building a web-based tele-operation system and access as well as sharing is granted to external parties. This makes controlling access to tele-operated resources become one of the important issues for tele-operation system development. However, this issue has not been significantly addressed. This thesis describes steps towards building a web-based tele-operation prototype system – a web-based collaborative tele-robotic system for both research and teaching. A new tele-operation framework was firstly formulated with special emphasis on access control and security control. This formulated framework was applied on the design and implementation of a web-based collaborative tele-robotic prototype system which allows groups of participants to collaboratively explore remote environments via controlling multiple tele-robots. The formulated framework can serve as a reference model for the design and implementation of various tele-operation systems. It also provides better modularity and reusability in the system design phase as well as provides a standard way for system benchmarking. The web-based tele-robotic prototype system consists of security control services, access control services and device control services. The security control services serve as a purpose to provide the protection of the overall tele-operation system against malicious attacks. The access control services provide a set of access control rules and various rule-enforcing mechanisms in order for managing the sharing of tele-operated resources. The device control services provide a means for system operators to explore remote site via web-based tele-robotic controls. This thesis has also addressed the shortcomings of the design of current implementations in literature and proposed some alternative approaches.