Designing telerobotic systems as distributed CORBA-based applications

Virtual laboratories and on-line robots are examples of distributed telerobotic systems based on emerging Internet technologies. Building these applications from scratch is a very demanding effort because they must satisfy a wide set of requirements, arising from both the distributed systems domain, e.g. location transparency and multiplatform interoperability, and the telerobotic domain, e.g. guaranteed quality of service, real-time operation, dynamic reconfigurability, concurrent or collaborative interaction among distributed sites. For these systems exploitation of an Object Oriented standard middleware like CORBA should be very effective, thanks to its well known features and services and its recent enhancements (Real-Time CORBA, AMI). In this paper we summarize our experience in the development of a software framework for telerobotics based on Real-Time CORBA. The framework takes advantage from CORBA services to allow implementation of advanced teleoperation systems, thereby avoiding proprietary or ad-hoc solutions for communication and priority management. In order to enable distributed collaboration and virtual laboratories, it also supports concurrent control and data distribution with multiple Clients. The framework has been evaluated in a real scenario, building a distributed telerobotic application which allows control of a robot arm and several sensors by multiple Clients.