The aim of this project is to command a robot nicknamed CYRO, located in the ESSI robotic classroom, through the network by using its 3D VRML representation. Most of Internet based skills and concepts were needed to achieve this practical work.
The project can be divided in three parts:
This network based project relies on a Java client-server model. The server is contineously running on the machine connected to the robot, and serving connections and requests of any potential clients. The client-server communications are provided by java sockets.
It's implemented using VRML 2.0 language. The interface between VRML 2.0 and the client is achieved through a script node written in Java code.
It's been implemented by using graphic objects of the awt library and allows users to pilot the robot. The virtual robot and the camera give the user real time positions of CYRO.
The main difficulty concerned Liquid Reality that gave us quiet a hard time to get round its security manager when it came to access network or native libraries. After a long and tiring week hacking nights and days, we managed to find THE solution. It consists in replacing the LR's security manager with a more gentle one... Once we checked out the reliability of our new security manager, we decided to inform our Java master, Peter Sander, as well as the students of our discovery.