Very innovative use of the web! Getting a picture of the whole "sandpit" at the beginning of a session would be a nice addition - but I suppose that voids the "robot's eye view" concept.

Incredible! This must be one of the most interesting pages ever! BTW, is there a problem with going out of bounds. It seems that the prog just kick me out. It would be nice if there was a "can't go there" or "attempt to move out of bounds" type mesg.

More operator time! 8-) I thought this was great! Maybe put some more stuff in the box. How about adding a claw? Kinda like those prize machines you find at the arcades. -Woo

Simply a delight. Undoubtedly an important step in the evolution of the internet. I hope that you can continue to support and expand this project. Paul Debevec

Very nice! A wonderful example of how WWW-based cooperative teleoperation can work... I'm looking forward to reading whatever you have written on the implementation.

it was fun !!!!

Quite fascinating, in a weird sort of way. I'm a chemical theorist, so my computer work is pretty removed from reality. It's not really any different from using a remote computer to operate an IR remote control, but it seems stranger.

This is by far the best interactive Web site that I have visited. I'll be back...

When are you going to add the connection to DANTE :).

interesting. operation is not intuitive from the instructions but becomes less opaque with practice. the movies and the narrative give this simulation a feeling very much like the Luxor experience. i would like to know how the images were constructed.

Very impressive! Best of luck with your project. -- Rahul rahuls@ri.cmu.edu Robotics Institute Carnegie Mellon University

An awesome display of the power of interactive networking. I love seeing just what todays technology can do, and thinking about the possibilities in the future. All I can say is WOW.. can I try again!? :)

This is cool!!!

Nice idea, only wish I had more time!

Very, very neat. The coolest thing about the Web is that it opens up to the world, as opposed to being a closed system. You guys have demonstrated that in one of the most intuitive ways possible. -- Raph

It was an interesting experiment, but I was unable to lower the arm into a position where I could use the air blast. It is hard to believe that used to program Zymark laboratory robots!

WAAYYY KUUL DOODZ! Only problem I encountered was how to queue to use the arm! I put myself "in line" and then went to observe the arm in action. I finally queued myself again and got to run it. How are you notified that it's your turn? tom coradeschi <+> tcora@pica.army.mil http://k-whiner.pica.army.mil/

Mega-Cool Too Cool Even better than the 'classic' Trojan Room! Now.... point a camera out the window, install some air jets by the sidewalk, and we'll have some real fun!

Very cool. Needs color!

Nice web server. What next? A robot that can move around a room and look around?

Very interesting, I am still not sure if this is a simulation or not. It would be faster if did not make the activity meter and other buttons into images but still getting 10-20 secs per update to the UK via a proxy server. Can't wait for your next project - Tele-operation during surgery would be exciting - could use blood loss instead of a fixed 5 minute time!

Cool beans.

Pretty neat! The image/XYZ screen didn't take mouse clicks for a while, although the Update button worked.

One of the coolest things I have seen on the Net!

This is great! Hmm, typo on this page "In no one is waiting" shd be "If no one"

Probably the coolest Web site. Ever.

Very cool. A noble waste of CPU and bandwidth. I have visited greatness. -rg

Very nice... one of the most original applications of the Web I've ever seen...

Excellent! Great way to interact with the Web and the world beyond it. Hard to wait for images to come back when the clock's ticking, though.

How about a few buried mirroring objects? When looking at them from the right point, they could show some of the surrounding room. Two remarks about your HTML:

1. You use a lot of <P> markup at uneccessary locations e.g. between </HEAD> and <BODY> markup
2. When you have a HREF with an image and a text and you leave a blank between the image source ref and the closing </A>, e.g. <IMG SRC=".....xx.gif"> </A>, than in the browser a little underscore appears right of the image. See the "Non-Registered Observation" Page. The first two red squares are okay, the other two have the underscore. I use Mosaic 2.4 on SGI-Hardware.

That's all for now

I saw your site, now you can see me!

Works markup?
A very good proof that despite all the fuzz about how great virtual reality is, that the real reality is still the most interesting. I am waiting for the guys who fix a camera on top of a small remote controlled toy car and let it running through their laboratory.

Nice and quick even from the UK at 0800 GMT. Lighting level seems much better now. Takes about 8-9 seconds for update!

The most inventive use of the web that I've seen so far. Nice interface... well done. BTW, what are you using to build the gif's? Of course, it would be neat if there was more stuff to dig up, but overall - I'm very impressed. -San

fun application. wish i could see things a little clearer. but the objects were fairly identifiable. what's next?

Very Cool and Very Interesting.

Well, my attempt to move things with the air jet didn't work.

This is a very interesting WWW application. The biggest problem is the delay between image updates, which makes the robot seem less interactive. Also, it's hard to tell what a lot of the objects are, especially up close when they aren't in focus. Please turn the objects with writing, so the writing is right side up, because otherwise I have to twist my head :-). In summary, I think this is one of the most interesting WWW things I've seen, because it allows me to interact with the "real world". I look forward to seeing what else you come up with; something that allowed me to build as well as explore would be very nice.

Any chance at color? That'd be more interesting. Also - have you put your code up for public use? I mean - the code sounds interesting, but a robot camera arm isn't too interesting in itself...

Way, way cool, dudes!! :-) I just wish the transatlatic connection was a bit swifter.

I've lost the images again. No amount of quitting and restarting seems to help.

More time!!!

hard to say, but set a good idea of WWW tele-robotics

Hmm.. about in the middle I failed to get image updates. Reload Images was a very bad idea... I got the "You're not the Operator" message and when relogged in I was right back in the failed session, but the images were working again. As a result I didn't get to play much Looks neat though... I'll come back later when the net is less hosed.

Several times I was "disconnected" and told that I didn't appear to be the operator. Otherwise, Cool!

My first move caused my viewing area to go black. I could not see what was going on so I quit.

Very cute. If it isn't real, it's an *amazing* simulation -- I think it's real.

Excellent interface.... A little more time would be nice.

fun. great itdea. hard to get the picture of what is where in only 5 minutes of use, but clearly you need to ilimit users' time. I. The surrounding story, video, etc is fun.

Demo Test Comments

Would be nice to be able to use it a little longer. Nice interface on WWW.

This is a realy cool system, especially with all the supporting story and movies and everything (the Qtime worked for me, but the MPEG was just grey, don't know why) a good option would be a "go down at this spot" and not make center and go down two steps. Both time I have been kicked off when I still saw two green bars.

Seems pretty neat, but it was so dark that I never saw any evidence of my having blown anything around. Other comments mentioned a light, I hope there is one, cause it was kind of difficult to tell what was going on.

Cool & fun demo and a good story. Interface often returned black images. Non-black images were very dark...

An update button is definitely needed to remove the blurred images caused by the motion of the robot.

Nice Quartz watch! Even the sweep second hand was a sweepin! Notice that the frame grabber is quick to grab a frame before the motion head has stopped vibrating. An update key would be handy for grabbing a fresh frame to elliminate the blurred image. --- Jay Nugent WB8TKL@hamgate.merit.edu jjn@merit.edu jjn@noc.ans.net

Very nice! Glad that I have a T1 link into the network so things go alot faster, updates, etc. Would like to see two light sources mounted on the camera head at different angles so that we can judge depth and texture better. --- Jay Nugent WB8TKL@hamgate.merit.edu jjn@merit.edu jjn@noc.ans.net

Too cool, too cool. How about two arms at the same time?

I vote "simulation". The dirt seemed to move by disproportionate amounts now and then.

Cool!

Excellent! Best WWW demo I've seen yet.

Pretty cool, guys.

Cool, but a tad too slow. Maybe I ought to try it sometime when it is not so much people on the net...

Sketfräckt

Hmm .. well, is that robot at your university or on the moon ? Mabe someone should have installed the switch for the light-bulb ?!? Honest : Impressive, mind-blowing, Interface Real-World/Cyberspace. Go for it :-) But I´d really like to know what you guys put into the deep of this sand ? I´ve just read something about ´fool´. Seems also that are some ants living in this area and please take out this used condoms ! Improve the view & it´s great. Have a nice day, Werner

Very nice! I think it would be nice with a scale at the bottom of the picture, to get an idea the size of things.

Nice

nice

Looks pretty neat. Kind of hard to do in real-time on a 14.4 connection, though. I'll try again on a faster connection. When I wasn't the operator, the updates weren't sending a new picture, which was a bit frustrating.

We also are working on this concept.

thanx for the test drive! engages the imagination... bowe strickland ncsu physics

Wish the illumination was slightly better. Perhaps a "virtual camera" can be added to intercatively chnage the end-effector position so the the camera can be more eaily manipulated. Also perhaps an extra degree of freedom can be added to the interface to view the area in a different angle. With a directional light we could get a better perception of the texture. -kesh

More fun than driving a car.

Way cool! It would obviously be a lot more effective to let the robot scan the area once with a camera, and then let the user operate on this photo, only interacting with the robot when one needs to operate the device to blow air.

Great stuff! (Hi Ken!) A couple things; either the light was off or there was nothing present in several spots on the right hand side. Some of the zoomed in images were badly out of focus On this page ("Your turn is over") it reads "In no one is waiting"; should be "if". Again, a great demo! :-)

Quite impressive. The images were rather dark though...

The watch is cool. (Louis says so.) Netcom Tech Support approves of this diversion; the sepia-toned photographs add a very nice touch. We would like to request that you add a remotely controlled unit wandering around the offices of UUNet, please. And we agree that it needs more light.

now, i've been on the dark side of the moon...

Great folks. I'll stop by later to see the 3-D solid model simulation that I'm sure you'll have done in about a month :) Much fun, thanks.

The picture quality wasn't very good, but it's still a great idea.

Hey man turn the light on!! I can't see a thing!! :-) Steven Good Job! -RK

very nice - is that a rogaine pamphlet I see?

no further comment there should be a 'no comment' button here

this is completely insane, I love it the camera resolution could be better, as could the lighting - it would be nice to be able to capture still frames in external viewers as well

It was very funny to move around and blow dirt! 8-)

AW.... what a great idea!

Somebody turned the lights off... I was over a mirror when the picture suddenly went dark. I managed to move off the mirror and got a picture again, but not as light as it was before some deity turned the lights down.

Hmm, this was fun. Just before time ran out I found a scrap of paper with some equation written on it.

Cool. Would be fun to read more about how this is implemented.

Very interesting!

this is cool. A driver from across the internet. neat.

This is great! if I weren't a famous dead astronomer, I'd be very excited.

There is a mirror at 236 366

I see there is some controversy over whether this is real or simulated. I think it is simulated because repeated blows on the same place (in my case) either don't do anything, or they move the arm to a different place, as if the system ran out of new images to show me. It's still up in the air (so to speak!) in my mind whether it's real or memorex, but in either case, it is a nice demonstration.

This is clearly a simulated robot. We hope to do something similar with real bots in our lab. I would be interested in hearing more about what technical issues you had in generating this interface, if there were any. There is a lab in Belgium doing this with real robots that I heard about at ALife this summer - I can't recall the details right now...

Impressive. Truly an innovative use of the Web.

Interesting.... it's still kind of dark and hard to tell what you're looking at, and for that matter if you are really excavating anything or just moving dirt around. Of course, that's probably true for archeology in general.

I can see myself!!! X:200 Y:350

need a larger workspace, and mroe resolution in the z axis. fun demo .

interesting

This was just too much fun. I'll be back this evening after a few of us swill beers at our favorite watering hole. We are working on a prototype for a lunar teleoperated system and this gives us a good way of experiencing reduced fields of view and remote operation. Great stuff. 

This is a very impressive demonstration. I'll be back.

COOL

I want to know what it says. It is a blast to use. A great project.

I glanced at the log before beginning my session, and saw that at least one person didn't believe the demonstration--- i.e., he thought it was simulated. So I spent most of my time trying to convince myself of yes or no: is it fake, or is it real. It occured to me that even if it is "fake," it's still a pretty cool demo. When my time ran out I wasn't sure. I probably will try it again. It would be nice to be able to get a view of the entire field. It's hard to know what the whole area is like by seeing only a little piece of it at one time. -Fred

This is one of the best things of seen on the Web. I'm jealous :-)

Seems like an interesting method for operating the robot. The small size of the image makes it somewhat difficult, however. In addition, it would seem that the ability to "survey" the area and display a "cartoon" or icon of an object on the graphical view would be VERY useful. With that, the operator could mark interesting things and could also look for paterns in the objects. Good job, keep up the good work.

A good overall picture of the site with dimensions or a commonly known object would be nice.

I agree that there could be a little more light. I was getting 3-5 second response time to the East Coast bouncing through a firewall in N.California... Very impressive.....

This is an excellent demo of what can be done both with robots and with the net. I work with the AI/Robotics Lab at Brown U and we are working on teleoperation but don't have anything this robust yet. Very very nice, folks. Adam Smith webmaster@ http://www.cs.brown.edu/research/robotics

Wow. Super neat. The images are rather dark though, and I'm still not comfortable moving things with the green diagram.

Some of the image views were too dark (at least on my display) to see well. Perhaps an automatic image enhance- ment (Gaussian histogram stretch?) could be done to the image. Otherwise, nice application-- I have plans to do something similar myself, but it'll be months before I'll be able to get to it.

Excellent!

Neat!!! One of the best waves I've caught while net-surfing. I agree that a gripper would be a great feature to add, but understand the risks that would add to the safety of the system. I'm working on a program called Ranger to launch a telerobot to Earth orbit in 1997. We will almost certainly offer net access to the images (like Dante II); we have not yet made a decision on allowing net-based operation of the manipulators. Good luck and keep up the great work!

I'M IN FRANCE NEAR PARIS. IT'S SLOW BUT FANTASTIC TO TELOPERATE A SO DISTANT DEVICE ... THANKS A LOT . PS: NO MORE LIGHT NOW ? THE VUE IS VERY DARK. I'LL COME BACK.

From Switzerland it is a little bit slow.... but still wanderful! Thanks a lot!!!!

I have discovered a RULE. It must be that the original inhabitants lived by well defined rules! In fact, rules of steel. Great fun.

That was truely cool. Every one here at Wired is very impressed. Any other projects coming up?

Well, a little hampered by the narrow field of view, but not terribly much by net delays to Australia.

It seems like it would be improved by allowing the user a certain number of "operation units". For instance, a blast of air might take 2, a move at distant level 1, and a close move at 1/2 - or predicate the energy level used up by how far in (x,y) units the robot moves. Are we supposed to figure out a theme for the objects within the enclosure?

This is pretty cool; one of the most original sites on the Web I have seen yet. Being a student studying robotics myself, I really appreciate some of the difficulties you must have run into. Fortunately, this is not a widely-known site, so you won't have too much traffic just yet. Unfortunately, the operator doesn't really get a feel for how large the field is; we have no idea what our boundaries really are. That's really the only suggestion I have.

Great demo. I liked both the concept and the user interface. Do you have any plans to extend this? It might be nice to add something like a gripper (suction cups?) that the user could open and close to move objects around.

This is way cool!

Impressive, Guys! We're considering adding something similar to our mobile 'bot once its more stable. Too bad we weren't the first to think of it :)

Very cool demo, surely the beginning of bigger and better things. I was running the demo on a Mac IICX connected to the Internet and updates were approx. 20-30 seconds. It would be even better if the image area wasn't erased between updates but was overwritten.

Camera seems out of focus at lowest point. Very interesting!

Very interesting but I found it difficult to achieve fine control of horizontal movement.

Arrrgggg!!! The network delay strikes again..

I've got to try this when the net traffic is slower. Great demo!!!

Way cool!

average transfer time 34 sec. stddev 12 sec best time 15 sec. Sweden-USA-Sweden. I think I picked a to busy time to try this out =) My time is 19:17 but you have lunch now right? I'll return some night =) =)

Nice Idea, I've been thinking along the same track myself. Im working with a SCARA-type robot myself see: URL:http://idefix.ikp.liu.se/rames/marwin.html But with the image-transfer times I got at the end, (Sweden-USA-Sweden) on 40 seconds to 1 min, 5 min. of exploring isn't much. Anyway this must be the future for the web. If it can keep up to carry all the traffic =)

First of all you might put some lights on. Secondly, a sideview of the actual robot (from another camera) would make it much more interesting.

Hmmm. I find the fact that the edeges of the excavation trough are masked to black. Is that for our convenience or to cover something up?

Okay, kids, here are my two best guesses for the "theme" of the objects in the trench: 1).)Things that have, at some point, been on a David Letterman "Top Ten" list 2.)Things that are _not_ found on Ronald Reagan's desk. anyone got a better idea?

actually , this is jeff W. I found a unknown metal doohicky at 360,400 can you tell what it is?

good job, y'all! I look forward to seeing the 'bot itself late later tonight. ;)

I found something but my compressed air wasn't strong enough to blow the large rock off the top of it. Neat idea. Todd

MIT TNS-like X Windows interface would have given faster response that the imagemaps, don't you think? Anyway, that was fun! -arun

This second time I managed to do something sensible - like trying to blow away some objects in order to read some letters underneath. We ought to get 10 operations of energy instead of a timed energy count but that may be hard to implement. Anyway great work guys. Anil.

This was great fun. Its a bit slow out operating from out in Europe - like 20 seconds for an update, sometimes longer. Somewhere in the "new operators" section, perhaps you could mention clearly that to operate the robot, you must get a "level 1 clearance". Or perhaps I didn't see that. I thought "lever 1 clearance" - an intimidating phrase - was for frequent users or something and not for the casual snooper. It'll be nice if we can pick/place/create some havoc instead of merely observing (Heisenberg notwithstanding).