Telepresence Interaction by Touching Live Video Images

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel telepresence interaction system using a touchscreen interface that enables remote operators to control robots and interact with objects by touching live video images, facilitating daily tasks remotely.

Contribution

The paper presents a new user interface, TIUI, that allows touch-based interaction with live video images for telepresence robots, enhancing remote manipulation capabilities.

Findings

System effectively enables remote manipulation of objects.

Remote operators can perform daily tasks like opening doors and pushing wheelchairs.

Demonstrations show promising applications and system effectiveness.

Abstract

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.