A World Wide Web Telerobotic Remote Environment Browser

Robots provide us with a means to move around in, visualize, and interact with a remote physical world. We have exploited these physical properties coupled with the growing diversity of users on the World Wide Web (WWW) [1] to create a WWW-based active telerobotic remote environment browser. This browser, called Mechanical Gaze, allows multiple remote WWW users to actively control up to six degrees of freedom of a robot arm with an attached camera to explore a real remote environment. The initial environment is a collection of physical museum exhibits which WWW users can view at various positions, orientations, and levels of resolution.