Control of Remote Robots by Means of Cell Phones

Since about two decades, cellular phones coupled to internet and wireless communications are offering many possibilities that can be exploited by classical telerobotics to free human operators from many constraints providing mobility and ubiquitous applications.

This paper presents the design and implementation of an experimental telerobotics system where the human operator supervises and controls remote robots by means of cell phones. To achieve this application, we used Java software namely J2ME platform which is dedicated for programming cell phones and J2SE platform for programming PCs. The adopted software technology of connection between the human operator and the remote robots uses the socket technique with client-server model. The cell phone held by the operator acts as a Client while a PC, situated at the remote robot site, acts as a Server. This application corresponds to Midlet-to-Servlet in Java terminology. Basic simulations and preliminary experiments have been successfully carried out with a three Degrees-of-Freedom (D.O.F) serial robot. These telerobotics systems based on cell phones are effectively offering interesting means to opening new perspectives for mobile and ubiquitous applications.