A dynamic web interface to a remote robot evaluated with a robotic telescope.

Abstract

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.