Telepresence or virtual presence has became more and more commonplace thanks to evolution of technology which implies an opening to the telework capacities. Telework is essentially linked to virtuality and telepresence and consequently linked to robotics and computing as well as communications. This work deals with the methods and the tools necessary to the achievement of a telework system via Internet. We have first presented, the technologies which has contributed to the advance of the telework. We will then focus on teleoperation and telerobotics and we will realize how virtual reality technologies contribute to cope with some problems due to the distance between the master and the slave sites. Secondly, our interest will focus on telework assistance via Internet. The methods and tools necessary to the achievement of transportable and configurable virtual fixtures are studied and a formalism is proposed. Thirdly, the useful methods for augmented reality control are studied (environment modeling, camera an robot calibration), then the selected method for the telework via Internet is presented. Then, the description of the experimental telework system namely ARITI (Augmented Reality Interface for Telerobotic applications via Internet) is given. Fourthly, Two applications are presented, one is about telemanipulation tasks, the other one is about teleoperation of the mobile robot. Finally, we will estimate the efficiency of some teleoperation tasks and video images compression methods. On the one hand, we will see the efficiency of the ARITI system with multiple connections, locale, medium and high distance. On the other hand, we will see how the distributed predictive display makes it easy for different operators to work together in cooperative mode.
Robotised Telework and Augmented Reality : Application to Teleoperation via Internet