Design and Evaluation of a Telepresence Vision System for Manipulation Tasks

This paper describes the design of a new telepresence vision system developed to realize a higher immersive feeling for telemanipulation tasks. A new measure of ´permissible visual errors´ was defined. Making use of this new measure, a minimal vision system is designed, containing only the strictly necessary DOF´s (degrees of freedom) while keeping the vision errors below an experimentally obtained set of permissible errors. The result is a 4DOF camera system, containing two rotational joints (pan-tilt) and two prismatic joints (horizontal plane.) An evaluation of the system was done through a telemanipulation task using a unified hand/arm teleoperation testbed. It was found that during use of the vision system almost all visual errors remained within the permissible errors. The proposed vision system design framework suggests to break away from simply (and often blindly) mimicking human appearance. Although we only dealt with the vision system design, the same concept could be used when designing any other part of a robot.