This thesis investigates the issues of creating a publicly accessible Web interface to a
remote autonomous robot: the Bradford Robotic Telescope. The robot is situated on
Mount Teide, on the island of Tenerife, Spain. Its mission is to provide interactive
access to the stars to people who would otherwise not be able to appreciate the wonders
of the night sky due to light pollution. Whenever weather and darkness permits, the
robot processes the observation requests submitted by users via the Internet, operating
all the hardware including the dome, telescope mount and cameras.
The question of how to enable a content rich high quality dialogue between one robot
and thousands of users is explored and divided into seven areas of research. How to
design a Web site enabling high quality interaction with the user, how to enable users to
request service from a robot, how to store and manage all the user and robot generated
data, how to enable communication between the Web interface and the robot, how to
schedule many observation requests in the best order, how to support a constant
dialogue between the robot and users to engage users in the robot's work, and how to
present and display users' completed observations.
These seven areas of research are investigated; solutions are presented and their
implementations examined and evaluated for their suitability and performance with the
Bradford Robotic Telescope, and for how they might perform for any job-based remote
robot.
Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:BRADFORD/oai:bradscholars.brad.ac.uk:10454/4479 |
Date | January 2010 |
Creators | Tallon, Christopher John |
Contributors | Not named |
Publisher | University of Bradford, School of Informatics |
Source Sets | Bradford Scholars |
Language | English |
Detected Language | English |
Type | Thesis, doctoral, PhD |
Rights | <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons License" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-nd/3.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />The University of Bradford theses are licenced under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/">Creative Commons Licence</a>. |
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