Research On Remote Monitoring And Control System Of Mobile Robot Based On RMI-IIOP

With the development of robot technology, the types of robot have been increasing. Different types of robots often have different hardware platforms and operating systems. At the same time, they often use different protocols to communicate and use different programming languages for application developments. These differences exhibit large heterogeneity of the robots and they hamper the mutual communication between the robots. So how to build a common platform to achieve mutual communication between different types of robots has become a valuable research topic.This dissertation uses RMI-IIOP middleware technology to solve the heterogeneous problem between mobile robots, and implements mobile robot remote monitoring under the B/S(Browser/Server) mode.This dissertation first introduces the fundamental concepts of Java RMI and CORBA. Then with a concrete analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of Java RMI and CORBA, the dissertation has an in-depth study on RMI-IIOP which is a combination of the advantages of Java RMI and CORBA. CORBA(Common Object Request Broker Architecture) establishes a cross-language framework of the distributed object system, and provides distributed practices of interaction between multilingual objects to support interoperability between heterogeneous distributed applications and object reuse which is independent of platform and programming language. CORBA is very complicated and developers usually have to undergo steep training curve before skilled using CORBA. Java RMI (Java Remote Method Invocation) is a technology of distributed system. Through using Java language to implement distributed objects, Java RMI allows a Java Virtual Machine to call a function of a remote object at another Java Virtual Machine in the network. So Java RMI provides a simple and direct way for distributed computing to use the Java objects. But Java RMI is only adapted to pure Java applications, and has poor cross-language feature. So the objects implemented in Java can not communicate with the objects implemented in other languages. RMI-IIOP is the basis of server-side Java development for the enterprise. RMI-IIOP overcomes the shortcomings of RMI and CORBA, and integrates the respective merits of RMI and CORBA. It has the simplicity of the Java RMI and language-neutrality of the CORBA. Developers rarely need to modify the applications invocating RMI calls over the IIOP protocol, and they can more easily program for distributed systems.Secondly, the dissertation sets the target of the system and designs a three-tier distributed network architecture based on the RMI-IIOP under the B/S model. The three tiers include data sources, web server and monitoring terminal. Data sources include mobile robot, sonar sensors, laser sensors, cameras, onboard PC and database server. Web server uses free and open-source Tomcat application server. Monitoring terminals can be any computer connected to the Internet.Subsequently the dissertation detailed displays the development process of mobile robots remote monitoring and control system. First a common interface for mobile robots is designed, then a concrete realization of the common interface according to MobileRobots is provided, and a universal server side and client side are developed. At the same time, through using JMF technology, the server side implements the real-time acquisition and delivery of video, and the client side implements real-time receive and display of video. Ultimately deployment and test of the system is implemented and the results show that the system has good workability, portability and cross-platform features.