Immersive interface for teleoperation

To use mobile robot platforms or other telerobotic manipulators in partly known or unknown surroundings, or for tasks which are hazardous for human life, it is important to ensure that the human-machine interface is adequate for such tasks. Telemanipulation require operators to have a good sense of the relative locations of objects in the work space. The goal is to simulate, in some sense, the presence of a human operator by providing sufficient feedback information of the remote site to the operator using an immersive stereoscopic vision system. Giving necessary information in a natural form facilitates all human-machine interactions. To give the user this feeling of immersion, which means the feeling to be part of the visual percepted scene, the presentation of the camera view and a natural, automated camera movement synchronized to the users head movement is essential. The aim of the study is to find a variable stereoscopic camera configuration-depending on the special viewer´s parameters-which allows one to eliminate most of the 3D-image distortions by the appropriate choice of system parameters. There are some distortions, however, which cannot be avoided due to the nature of human vision and the limitations of current stereoscopic video display techniques