Telepresence Interaction by Touching Live Video Images
This addresses the need for more intuitive telepresence interactions for remote users, though it is incremental as it builds on existing touchscreen and robot technologies.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling remote operators to interact with physical objects through a telepresence robot by introducing a touch-based interface (TIUI) that allows touching live video images to operate objects, with evaluation showing effectiveness for daily tasks like opening doors and pushing wheelchairs.
This paper presents a telepresence interaction framework based on touchscreen and telepresence-robot technologies. The core of the framework is a new user interface, Touchable live video Image based User Interface, called TIUI. The TIUI allows a remote operator to not just drive the telepresence robot but operate and interact with real objects by touching their live video images on a pad with finger touch gestures. We implemented a telepresence interaction system which is composed of a telepresence robot and tele-interactive objects located in a local space, the TIUI of a pad located in a remote space, and the wireless networks connecting the two spaces. Our system can be a perfect embodiment of a remote operator to do most of daily living tasks, such as opening a door, drawing a curtain, pushing a wheelchair, and other like tasks. The evaluation and demonstration results show the effectiveness and promising applications of our system.