I am hoping to get some opinions from someone who has experience in designing remotely controlled robots (semi-autonomous) whereby the operator sitting on a computer far away using a web browser would be able to see what the robot is doing while also being able to give instruction to the robot via the web browser (eg. mouse or keyboard or joystick). My first reaction would have been to write a cgi program running on the remote machine and have that program give command to the robot (servo motor, pneumatics). While the cgi program would interact with the browser through standard http. However the problem would be the visual interface, how to send the realtime camera link up to the browser through the cgi program. This shows another weakness with cgi program, its just not real time enough with a context-switch everytime you run it. Surely someone out there have ran into this problem before. How did you go about doing it? what programming paradign did you use? (cgi? java? or code your own winsock program)?
- posted
18 years ago