Telepresence

Telepresence

An early attempt at reducing cognitive fatiguewas to addmore cameraswith
faster update rates to widen the field of view and make it more consistent
with how a human prefers to look at the world. This may not be practical

for many applications because of limited bandwidth. Video telephones, picture
phones, or video-conferencing over the Internet with their jerky, asynchronous
updates are usually examples of annoying limited bandwidth. In
these instances, the physical restrictions on how much and how fast information
can be transmitted result in image updates much slower than the rates
human brains expect. The result of limited bandwidth is jerky motion and
increased cognitive fatigue. So adding more cameras only exacerbates the
problem by adding more information that must be transmitted over limited
bandwidth.
One area of current research TELEPRESENCE in teleoperation is the use of telepresence to
reduce cognitive fatigue and simulator sickness by making the human-robot
VIRTUAL REALITY interfacemore natural. Telepresence aims for what is popularly called virtual
reality, where the operator has complete sensor feedback and feels as if she
were the robot. If the operator turns to look in a certain direction, the view
from the robot is there. If the operator pushes on a joystick for the robot to
move forward and the wheels are slipping, the operator would hear and feel
the motors straining while seeing that there was no visual change. This provides
amore natural interface to the human, but it is very expensive in terms
of equipment and requires very high bandwidth rates. It also still requires
one person per robot. This is better than traditional teleoperation, but a long
way from having one teleoperator control multiple robots.