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Advanced Remote Control of Mobile Robots using Mobile Devices
Mobile devices, like cellphones or smart phones, can nowadays be used to monitor and control remote devices like technical systems or mobile robots.

While monitoring systems do not have high requirements on the transmission time of the displayed data, navigating a mobile robot from remote requires more real time data transfers. Therefore not only the possibilities of using mobile devices where researched, but also the supported data transmission channels like UMTS, GSM, Wireless LAN and Bluetooth where examined and benchmarked.

As a result of this research a prof of concept application where implemented. A mobile robot running a server program on its on board computer, connected to the faculties Wireless LAN, can be controlled through a small client written in JavaMe and runnable on most mobile devices.

While the first version of this remote controll aplicaiton was limmited to the Pioneer robot platform manifatured by MobileRobots, the current version was adpoted to a less limited robot programming platform called Player/Stage. Using the Player/Stage platform does not only enable the seamless adoption of the controlling programm running on the robot to diffrente robot platform, it also provides the possibility to drive omnidirectional mobile robots.

This talk presents the results from the measured charateristics of the different wireless communication channels. Futhermore an overview over the developed application and the changes needed for omnidirectional robots is given. The talk concludes with an overview of the pros and cons of using mobile devices and radio based communication channels to control remote devices.