Telerobotic system based on natural language and computer vision

Although telerobotic systems are becoming more complex, there are few actions they can perform on their own and, moreover, knowledge about the tasks they are being used for often relies only on their operator. In this paper, we present the design of a telerobotic system that features learning capabilities, can accept commands given in natural language and provides control of a generic vision-guided robot. This system is composed of a set of functional blocks that communicate among them according to the CORBA standard over an Internet-based network. Knowledge is originated from interaction with users and is stored in a shared database. The user interface translates user commands into a set of predefined commands that the robot controller can understand, making it unnecessary for users to know which particular robot they are working with. We describe the design of this system and focus on two of its main components: the user interface and the robot controller.