Controlling a real robot from Second Life

CSIRO's ICT Centre has more than fifty projects which they will pay university students to do over the summer vacation. One example is to interface a real industrial robot so it can be controlled from within the Second Life Virtual reality world. While the web site says applications have closed, there may be some late applications considered:

Project 41: Use of Gaming Engines for Telerobotics
Location: Canberra ...
Skills: Experience with the Second Life Environment
Experience with scripting in Second Life, programming skills.
Prerequisite Criteria: Partially completed degree in Engineering or Computer Science.
Project description: Controlling the real world from Second Life

The aim of this project is to explore the use of Second Life as a platform for teleoperating real world devices. Second Life provides a sophisticated gaming environment that can be used for interacting with real world devices. You will control a robotic device by manipulating a model of the device you create in Second Life, then investigate the suitability of gaming environments for a teleoperating real world equipment. Your teleoperated device can remain as a permanent demonstration on the Second Life CSIRO island.

Within the telerobotics project there is a Mirror World activity and this vacation project is intended to be an integral part of this activity. Gaming environments provide sophisticated three dimensional worlds that could be much more effective for teleoperating equipment than existing alternatives. The use of gaming environments for teleoperation is a new idea that may expand the reach of teleoperation to applications where teleoperation is in its infancy. The application domain in which we are particularly interested is remote mining. Currently information services are outsourced to call centres and teleoperation provides the opportunity to extend the concept to physical services.

There will be a demonstrator developed that will reside permanently on the CSIRO island in Second Life. The student will apply their gaming skills to controlling a device in the real world from a virtual world. The student will evaluate the effectiveness of the teleoperating from a virtual world.

What is the vacation scholar going to learn through this project?
The student will learn about immersive environments, teleoperation and how to extend a gaming engine to teleoperate a device. They will develop programming skills and skills in evaluating usability.

From: ICT Centre 2007 Vacation Scholarship Program, CSIRO, 28/9/2007

Of course this is not the first robot on the Internet. In 1994 Ken Taylor demonstrated control of a robot in Perth from Canberra. That robot is still online.

Perhaps the student could get second life to work on the OpenMono Linux smart phone and control the robot from that. There is an alpha version of a Second Life client for Linux.

Some of the other projects look interesting as well:

1: Extending the VotApedia Audience Response System # 3
2: Rate Control of Video over IP Networks # 4
3: Security Exposure of Virtual Machines # 5
4: Development of a key management service on a portable Trust
Extension Device (TED) for trust enhanced SOA applications. # 6
5: Interference Study in Wireless Sensor Networks # 8
6: Visual mark-up and rapid prototyping of tailored information delivery systems # page .9
7: Intelligent support for ‘on-the-fly’ document tailoring # 11
8: Declarative program synthesis for the Web # 13
9: Semantic Security Views # 15
10: Change management in Composed Web Services # 16
11: Web Service Mining # 17
12: Bootstrapping Reputation in Web Service Environments # 18
13: Automatic creation of overview pages for science communicators 19
14: Improving search algorithms for better health information # 21
15: Correction of intensity inhomogeneity of Magnetic Resonance images in 3D # 23
16: Design of 3D Visualization tools for brain surface information analysis for Alzheimer's disease diagnosis # 24
17: Live-wire based semi-automatic segmentation of Medical images # 25
18: Building a case database for the Colonoscopy Simulation Project #27
19: Efficient visualization and multivariate analysis of multiple images # 28
20: Post processing techniques to derive and visualize clinically significant information from ambulatory monitoring data. # 29
21: A web based graphical viewer for biomedical time series signals and hierarchical activity profile visualisation # 31
22: Structured Pathology Reporting using Natural Language Input # 33
23: Digital Mammogram Class Library # 35
24: Digital Image Watermarking of Mammograms # 36
25: Statistical parameter estimators in modelling of high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) # 37
26: Characterization and electromagnetic modelling of board connectors for high speed digital applications # 39
27: Electromagnetic modelling of reconfigurable antenna arrays # 40
28: Modelling electromagnetic waves in millimetre-wave integrated circuits # 41
29: Super-resolution terahertz imaging # 42
30: Non-linear inverse scattering # 44
31: Steerable Antenna Design For Future Gigabit Wireless Networks # 46
32: Improving Performance of Radio Tracking # 48
33: Multi-user WLAN Downlink Implementation for Dense Networks # 50
34: GPS Reference for Radio Tracking System # 52
35: Sigma Delta D/A converter using Rocket I/O # 53
36: Communicating agents for self-repairing power grids # 54
37: Image processing and streaming over a wireless sensor network. # 56
38: Hardware Development of a Small Mobile Robot for Sensor Network Assisted Operations # 58
39: Software Development of a Small Mobile Robot for Sensor Network Assisted Operations # 60
40: Simulation and Visualization Optimization # 62
41: Use of Gaming Engines for Telerobotics # 63
42: Laser targeted positioning of a robotic manipulator # 64
43: Real-time hyper-spectral image processing and classification of marine micro-organisms # 65
44: Computer Controllable Power Switching Device for Avionics Systems # 67
45: Self-assembly Simulator # 68
46: Low power motion tracking in wireless sensor networks # 70
47: On the Reliable Data Transport Protocol in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) # 72
48: Simulation of Self-repairing Modular Robots # 73
49: Benthic image analysis # 74
50: Power grid outages and PLC # 75
51: Online Food Frequency Questionnaire # 76
52: Sea Sentinel – Propulsion, Steering and Sensor Integration # 77
53: Sea Sentinel – Navigation and Control Systems # 78
54: Visualisation of multiple proteomic data sources # 79
55: Modelling Sensor/Observation Characteristics in SensorML # 80
56: An evaluation of spatial and temporal ontologies # 81

From: ICT Centre 2007 Vacation Scholarship Program, CSIRO, 28/9/2007