Motion compression applied to guidance of a mobile teleoperator

Telepresence aims at giving a human user the impression of being present in a remote environment. However, the user is actually situated in a user environment and his motion is tracked. A mobile teleoperator in the remote environment replicates this motion. The user can thus control the mobile teleoperator´s locomotion by walking. A stereo-camera system mounted on the mobile teleoperator constantly records live camera images and transfers them to the user environment, where they are presented to the user on a head-mounted display. This paper presents a long distance experiment, in which a mobile teleoperator was controlled over a standard Internet connection by natural locomotion. Without further processing of the user´s motion data, however, only exploration of a remote environment of the same size or smaller than the user environment is possible. As this is not desirable, we use motion compression, an optimal nonlinear transformation of the user´s path. This algorithm allows controlling free motion in an arbitrarily large target environment from a limited user environment.