Supermedia enhanced e-service robots

The Internet, also known as e-world, has added a new dimension to many of the traditional concepts in industrial applications and everyday life. Many words encountered nowadays are prefixed by the letter "e" to reflect their close relation to the electronic world. Therefore, it was not surprising when researchers and businesses started developing "e-services", which are simply services provided via the Internet. The use of robots has dramatically expanded the potential of e-services. Now individuals with particular expertise can perform highly accurate and fairly complicated tasks remotely via the Internet. This increase in the human reachability is faced with several obstacles. Reliable and efficient robot facilitated services via the Internet face several challenges. These range from human-computer interfacing and overcoming random time delay to task synchronization and human-robot interaction. These limitations intensify when supermedia is being fed back and rendered in real-time. Supermedia are the term used to describe the collection of all the feedback streams; such as, haptic, video, audio, temperature and others. This paper provides new theoretical and experimental results on supermedia enhanced e-services. The main characteristics of such systems are Internet based real-time closed loop control with supermedia rendered in their original form.