ARCHITECTURES FOR THE E-LEARNING MECHATRONIC LABORATORY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF ORADEA

1. ARCHITECTURES FOR THE E-LEARNING MECHATRONIC LABORATORY AT THEUNIVERSITY OF ORADEA Ildiko Margit PAŞC1 Radu Cătălin ŢARCĂ2 Florin POPENŢIU-VLĂDICESCU3 1UNIVERSITY OF ORADEA, SYSTEM ENGINEERING DEPARTMENT 2 UNIVERSITY OF ORADEA, MECHATRONICS DEPARTMENT 3UNESCO CHAIR IN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGIES

2. 1. Introduction Experimentation is a very important part of education in engineering. This is also true for mechatronic engineering, which is a relatively new field, combining three engineering disciplines: mechanical engineering, electrical engineering and software engineering. The equipments needed for experiments in mechatronic are generally expensive. One solution for expensive equipments is sharing the available equipments with other universities around the world. Two are the possibilities to realize it: • remotely accessible student laboratory facilities - with the advent of the Internet and its rapidly spreading adoption in almost all spheres of society - have become feasible and are increasingly gaining popularity. • Virtual reality (VR) is a system which allows one or more users to move and react in a computer generated environment.

3. HUMAN Action (Through his/her body) Actorical interface Commands signals Action Through tools Real remote environment (properties) Actuators Information Information Sensorial interface Information signals Transductors sensors Figure 1. Remote laboratories 2. E-learning laboratories structures At present, several e-learning laboratories have been developed. It can be distinguish two categories of them: -   remote laboratories, which offer remote access to real laboratory equipment and instruments;

4. HUMAN Action (Through his/her body) Actorical interface Commands signals Personal computers Virtual environment (properties) Information Information signals Sensorial interface Figure 2. Virtual laboratories • virtual laboratories, which offer access to an virtual environment using for this simulation software;

5. 3. Architectures for the e-learning mechatronic laboratory at the University of Oradea In figure 3 is presented a general architecture on second generation of Internet robot. Controllers of the mobile robot will consist three layers. Priority will decide, at given moment, which layer will control the actuators. • Unconditioned reflex of stopping and moving from the nearest vicinity of the obstacles layer (UR) will have the highest priority. This reflex will be activated each time when obstacle in the "security area" around the mobile base would be detected. • Conditioned reflex of avoiding obstacles layer (CR) is the second priority layer of the controller. There will be "attention area" defined around the "security area". If obstacle will be detected in this area, robot would stop and inform about this remote operator. If in the future situation with the obstacle detected in the "attention area" neural network recognize similar situation with the autonomously perform obstacle: avoiding manoeuvre. As the robot will move, it will autonomously avoid obstacles. • Remote human operator's excisions are the hired layer (HD) of the controller. This layer has the lowest level of priority. The human operator would control the robot's movements as long as no obstacle is detected in the "security area" or in the "attention area". He would also show the CR module how to behave in the unknown situations.

7. In figure 4 is presented the schematically scheme of the proposed architecture for the remote laboratory system. • The system was realized using a client-server network approach that allows the concurrent execution of multiple experiments using separate experimental set-ups. • Experiments that require the same set-up are queued and executed in the order of the incoming requests. The connection from the laboratory to the outside world is established using a Linux-enabled web server. • The web server is networked to individual data acquisition PC terminals running Windows XP. • The virtual laboratory system existing at our university but it is at the beginning. It has an ordinary structure: the PC with VRML (Virtual Reality Modelling Language), a HDM (Head Mounted Display), and a glove as a haptic device. Some applications in VRML were done on this system, applications that are used at the AI laboratory and Service Robot laboratory.

8. Figure 4. Architecture of the remote laboratory

9. 4. Conclusion • The goal of our work is to building a networked telerobotic system, so that the Intemet users, especially researchers and students, to be able to control the mobile robot to explore a dynamic environment remotely from their home and share the robot system with us. • The long-term goal of our research is towards real-world applications such as tele-manufacturing, tele-training, and tele-service. The system, which we want to create, is able to add more mobile robots and connect more video cameras. The visual feedback module written in Java allows for fast image updating, and presents a quite reliable view for the Web user. We are currently investigating both supervisory control and cooperative learning control. • The main focus is placed on how to provide a telerobot with a high degree of local intelligence to handle restricted bandwidth and transmission delay of the network and how to integrate multiple mobile robots into a telerobotics system to achieve redundancy and robustness. • This will pave the way for the remote exploration of an unknown and complex environment through the Intemet and other applications such as tele-training, tele-service, and tele-manufacturing

10. References • Conde, T.Thalmann, D., Learnable Behavioural Model for Autonomous Virtual Agents : Low-Level, in Proceedings of Fith International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems 2006 (AAMAS-06), Hakodate, Japan, May 2006, pp. 89-96 ; • Deisinger, J. A. Kun,Immersive Projestion Technology and Virtual Envoronments 2003 Workshop Proceedings of the joint IPT and EG workshop in Zürich, 22.-23. Mai, 2003, ACM, New York, 2003 ; • Diaconu, A., Diaconu, D.,Intemet Teleoperation of Robots, Proc XV th. Robotics National Symposion, Oradea, Octoberl8-2l th. 2000 ; • Ferwom, A., Roque, Vecchia, I, MAX: Wirelessteleoperation via the World Wide Web, Proc. IASTED Conf. on Robotics & Applications, pp 158-162, Santa Barbara, 28-30 October 1999 ; • Ken Taylor, Barney Dalton, "Internet Robots – A new robotics niche", IEEE Robotics and Automation Vol. 7 No. 1 March 2000 pp. 27-34. • Kosuge, K., Kikuchi J.,Takeo.K. VISIT: A Teleoperation system via computer Network, Proc. IROS'98: Workshop on Web Robots, pp 61-66, Victona, Canada, l2-17 0ctober, 1998 ; • McKee, G and Barson, R, NETROLAB: providing access to robotics technology using the Intemet. Robotics and Machine Perception. Special issue: Networked Robotics. USA: SPIE, 5, 1996 ;

11. Ott, R. Gutierrez, M. Thalmann, D. Vexo, F., Advanced Virtual Reality Technologies for Surveillance and Security Applications, in the Proceedings of the ACM SIGGRAPH International Conference on Virtual Reality Continuum and Its Applications (VRCIA 2006), Hong-Kong, 14-17 June 2006 ; • S.H. Chen, R. Chen, V. Ramakrishnan, S.Y Hu, Y. Zhuang, C.C. Ko, Ben M. Chen, "Development of Remote Laboratory Experimentation through Internet" in Proceedings of the !999 IEEE Hong-Kong Symposium of Robotics and Control, July 1999, pp.756-760 ; • Simmons, R XAVIER: An autonomous mobile robots on the Web, Proceedings of IROS'98 Workshop on Web Robots, pages 43-48, Victona, Canada, l2-17 0ctober, 1998 ; • Tuttas J., Wagner, B, "Distributed Laboratories." in Proceedings of International Conference on Engineering Education, August 6-10 2001, Oslo, Norway. • Ţarcă R, Vesselenyi T., Ţarcă I. , The interaction between humans and real, virtual and virtualized enviromment, in ROBOTEP 2004 7th International Conference on Automation/Robotics in theory and practice, Kosice, pp160-167, pg.8, 2004 ;