Dear Emmanual,

Thank you very much for your comments on our paper and letting us to express our work more.

Here are the answers to the questions:

You are right this is a hot topic to be discussed recently.

The advantages of using this robot are:

       This is a multi-purpose mobile robot to be used in R&D and education as well as industry.

        The second, this robot is a compact robot and developed with limited support and includes hardware, software, and mechanics in design. 

         The third, if you are aware of mobile robot community you should be aware of that transmiting image in wireless environment requires broadband but recent technology can not provides this so we developed a technicque to make the transmission faster.

       The most important issue of our work is to use SUNAR in engineering education to support image processing, programming, robotics, assembly, artificial intelligence lectures in real time implementation. If a student would like to do a real-time experiment at home can connect to the robot website and do the real time experiment without any time and place dependency. These ideas are new and the advantages of SUNAR in the research field.

When we talk about the disadvantages: SUNAR requires recharging every four hours, laptop is heavy (better and lighter labtop is required), in some cases initialasation causes problem.    

2. The robot presented in this paper was designed to operate in situations as described in the article. It has a semi-autonomous behavior and was designed to operate in plain surfaces. By semi-autonomous behavior we mean that a human supervision is always necessary although the robot can also take its own decisions. Basically the robot is commanded by an operator that receives pictures from the robot's environment broadcasted through the Internet.

3. Because of password problem I was unable to upload my presentation on time. Sorry for the late uploading.

Finally, we have given here to express the mechanics of SUNAR and did not explain the details of it for specific task. In ongoing articles, we will be publishing those works.

Seref Sagiroglu

Thank you very much for your comment on our paper and letting us to express our work more.

Here is the answer to the question:

This question you asked is very important to distinguish our work from others. SUNAR is a multi-purpose mobile robot to be used in R&D and education as well as industry. As I explained earlier, this robot is a compact robot and developed with limited support and includes hardware, software, and mechanics in design.  SUNAR is especally designed for engineering education to support image processing, programming, robotics, assembly, artificial intelligence lectures in real time implementation. If a student would like to do a real-time experiment at home, he/she can connect to the robot website and do the real time experiment without any time and place dependency. Online libraries help students to do their work as quick and easy as possible and also can upload their own programs to the platform and check if the program works in real-time application. These ideas are new and the advantages of SUNAR in the research field.

Seref Sagiroglu

Thank you very much for your comments on our paper and letting us to express our work more.

Here is the answer to the questions:

You are right it seems our work is based on vision. That is true. For the time being our robot experiments are vision based. In near feature, we are going to add new sensors to SUNAR for complicated tasks. When we consider our work on your point of view we might say that "real-time image processing is performed using the onboared wireless computer". Let me explain once more that SUNAR is a multi-purpose sensorless (image based) mobile robot to be used in R&D and education as well as industry. SUNAR is especially desiged for engineering education to support some of the lectures such as image processing, programming, robotics, control etc. in real time implementation.  For example in control, robot vehicle and camera control algorithm can be replaced according to the requirements. 

According to the scenarios we selected for SUNAR, we tried to avoid blind spots. Incase this is happened, robot initialises itself or requires an operator help. The objects we have tested sofar can be all detected. You are right it may occur as well.

Seref Sagiroglu

Even if your robot cannot see an obstacle that is preventing it from moving, I suppose that it's possible to deduce its presence.  The camera can sense when the robot is moving, e.g. using optic flow.

Mind you, accelerometers are very small and cheap ;) 

Dear Dr. Zlatov,

Thank you very much for your interest.

Web security is another important issue certainly. For this type of application, we think that it is not that much important yet. In this article, we do not consider that point. We are aware of that adding new algorithm might cause some delays in communication. So, we only use the security provided within the communication hardware by default. It is also possible to make the communication more secure adding an encryption-decryption algorithm even if the delay according to critical tasks.  I think this is quite enough for this application. If it is necessary we can add our own algorithm to make communication more secure as well.

Seref Sagiroglu

Dear Mark,

You are right if your aim is only to move the robot. As we stated in the article, this is a vision based robot and used for many vision based applications, please consider that this is a multi-purposed mobile robot.

I have to remind you that a web camera is also a cheap solution :)

Seref.