| This thesis presents a distributed architecture based on the usage of intelligent user interfaces and multiagent systems to facilitate cooperative Internet-based remote interaction with a multirobot system. The proposed system relies on the agent paradigm for dealing with the size and complexity of cooperative remote interaction systems with multirobots, while taking advantage of intelligent user interfaces for obtaining high degree of naturalness during the interaction sessions. This generic architecture, featuring multimodality and adaptivity, supports an unlimited number of robots, an unlimited number of behaviors, and offers different operation modes making it a suitable platform for mobile multirobot remote applications. A concern is made around the user-centered experience, in order to provide the user with seamless interaction despite the scalability. Two different application scenarios based on this architecture are implemented and demonstrated to verify the architecture's efficacy. The first application, PAMI Tour, is an interactive tour providing users the ability to tour a robot around our lab and know the facilities of each room through a web interface. The second application, PAMI Robotics Yellow Pages, is an online directory of cooperative behaviours developed by PAMI researchers, allowing users to view and activate any cooperative behaviour onto the robots easily. To the extent of our knowledge, this thesis presents the first attempt of using Macromedia Flash as an implementation tool for generating a real-time Internet-based multirobot interface. Flash provides functionality to create and deliver rich web content and powerful applications. Flash is extremely well suited to creating content for delivery over the Internet because its files are very small. |
