Above image depicts possibly the earliest record of collaborative telerobotics. NASA's Mars Sojourner is a well-known example. The Sojourner telerobot, like almost all telerobots to date, is controlled by a single human operator. With CT, participants collaborate rather than compete for access to valuable resources such as historical and scientific sites.
Collaboration is a crucial ingredient for education and teamwork.
A scalable infrastructure for CT, compatible with the Internet, would allow large groups of students or researchers to simultaneously participate in remote experiences. For example, CT can allow groups of disadvantaged students to collaboratively steer a telerobot through a working steelmill in Japan or the Presidential Inauguration, and allow groups of researchers to collaboratively steer a telerobot around a newly active volcano or a fresh archaeological site. CT raises fundamental new research questions in theory, algorithms, and system implementation. Experimental evidence with subsumption and behavior suggests that such systems perform surprisingly well and are robust to noise and uncertainty. We propose a formal model to study many-one control.