Quality of service on a distributed Virtual Reality system for robots tele-operation over the internet

Virtual Reality applications for tele-operation are the base for nowadays development of virtual laboratories where researchers can share work at distance. Such systems must support a distributed framework to scale and a good Quality of Service (QoS) support to be effective. This paper proposes such a system, where the aim is the teleoperation of robots for complex cooperation tasks between peers. The system has multimedia components and virtual reality interfaces to control and monitor the real robots state. To ensure the QoS, good politics must be defined to manage the resources of the system to reduce bandwidth consumption over the internet. To apply the QoS policies, an online algorithm is adapted and compared against a greedy version. The online algorithm is taken from a financial set of algorithms used to invest in stock markets. The analogy between stock markets and the QoS control is shown as promising for further applications with QoS support over the internet. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006