An internet of laboratory things Drysdale, Timothy D.; Braithwaite, N. St.J
2017 4th Experiment@International Conference (exp.at'17),
2017-June
Conference Proceeding
By creating "an Internet of Laboratory Things" we have built a blend of real and virtual laboratory spaces that enables students to gain practical skills necessary for their professional science and ...engineering careers. All our students are distance learners. This provides them by default with the proving ground needed to develop their skills in remotely operating equipment, and collaborating with peers despite not being co-located. Our laboratories accommodate state of the art research grade equipment, as well as large-class sets of off-the-shelf work stations and bespoke teaching apparatus. Distance to the student is no object and the facilities are open all hours. This approach is essential for STEM qualifications requiring development of practical skills, with higher efficiency and greater accessibility than achievable in a solely residential programme.
This paper addresses the development of a new teleoperation framework for remote robotics. The status of existing robotic teleoperation systems is introduced, with emphasis on several technological ...drawbacks and is followed by a description of the design, development and implementation of a new framework based on bleeding edge technologies in internet protocols and software engineering related to robotics. As a first implementation, an update of an existing tele-robotics laboratory is in progress aiming round-the-clock networked access, suited for even the most demanding online learning platforms. A comparison between the current and previous teleoperation system is also published verifying the implemented framework.
When a consumer (or client) invokes a provider's service that has a long time processing, a synchronous call is not a good option. This kind of communication blocks the consumer until the response ...arrives, and, besides, the invocation timeout can be reached raising a timeout error. Hence, an asynchronous call is more appropriate where the consumer calls the provider's service and continues processing, and, when the provider's service finishes it pushes the response to the consumer. There are different ways for implementing an asynchronous communication. A simple way is the consumer providing a callback function which the provider's service invokes when it finishes the processing, performing a server push operation. However, there are many cases where this solution cannot be applied requiring other alternatives, e.g.: the consumer keeps up with the service execution checking for its readiness or state, and when it finishes, it calls another provider's service to get the result; the consumer and provider keep an open connection for the asynchronous communication. This work analyzes the main server push technologies used for web development, presenting their weaknesses and strengths, and the existing main challenges. As a result, we provide a technologies comparison, and a classification based on multiple qualitative dimensions that helps one to choose the technology that fits its requirements and/or can be used to guide future researches in this field.
Providing Internet users with good 3D representations used to be a hard task, not only for web graphic designers but also for web programmers. However, the rapid evolution of SmartPhones has ...drastically changed the industry. In this paper we attempt to evaluate server and client-side rendering procedures for web 3D animation delivery. Using Ajax and WebSockets, we have developed two discrete instances of a server-side rendering system. We have also implemented an X3Dom equivalent scenario that utilizes X3D and HTML5/WebGL technologies, to emulate client-side rendering on the same environment. The three implementations are evaluated in terms of battery and memory consumption, latency in graphics display and required network resources.
With the advancement of both 3D scanning technologies and Web3D, it is now feasible to convert Cultural Heritage objects and locations of interest into synthetic 3D scenes, and directly embed them in ...HTML pages so that users can visit them remotely, from practically any Web-enabled device. However, since such scanned scenes tend to be extremely detailed and consist of large volumes of data, browsing them can become a long, burdensome experience. While a number of progressive streaming approaches for 3D graphics have been proposed in the past, such methods tend to require a radical restructuring of the original data in order to be streamed to a web client. We implement a platform for 3D scenes that can stream any model encoded in declarative X3DOM format without further pre-processing. We explore a number of state-of-the-art web technologies for model transmission, and compare them to the typical methods used until now. We present the advantages of each, and lay the groundwork for further extensions to our approach, towards a large-scale platform for the smooth streaming distribution of detailed 3D scenes to a large number of clients, without needing to destroy the original model Web3D format.
Responsive Real-Time Collaborator with Audio Channel Aldave, Jomelyn R.; Maravillas, Elmer A.
2015 International Conference on Humanoid, Nanotechnology, Information Technology,Communication and Control, Environment and Management (HNICEM),
12/2015
Conference Proceeding
Responsive Real-Time Collaborator with Audio Channel, or simply, RTCollaborator, is a user- friendly web application using a responsive layout web design that supports voice and text chat and also ...has a shared board tool. The application allows users to draw on the board, make flowchart diagrams and see each other's changes, drawings and writings at real- time.
This paper addresses the replacement of acknowledgement based protocols for teleoperation. The initial sections compare the currently used protocols like HTTP and TCP to WebSockets and examine the ...structural difference of using one over the other, for a real-time teleoperation scenario. A detailed analysis of HTTP and WebSockets is performed using live teleoperation by multiple users performing temporally seperated tests under variably delayed network conditions. The existing teleoperation laboratory at the University of Wuerzburg was used as the test bed to compare these protocols and final teleoperation results in terms of bandwidth, frame-rate, navigation efficiency and situational awareness are presented and discussed.
This paper presents two simple, practical and scalable architectures which facilitate real-time sensor data streaming for cloud applications. Real-time sensor data is invaluable in applications where ...either the sensor or system state is time variant. Applications involving sensors typically push live data values to cloud based software applications that rely on live data feeds to aid real-time analytics, multi-user collaboration, processing, and re-transmission. The proposed architectures utilize the latest HTML5 WebSocket framework and NODE.JS API to facilitate transmission of real time sensor data. The strength of our architectures leverage vast ubiquitous computing resources available both on the cloud and at the client end to create a rapidly deployable, low-cost, and scalable real-time communication link.
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