Visual and haptic collaborative tele-presence

The core of a successful sense of presence is a visually, aurally, and haptically compelling experience. In this paper, we introduce the integration of vision and haptics for the purposes of remote collaboration. A remote station acquires a 3D-model of an object of interest which is transmitted to a local station. A user in the local station manipulates a virtual and the remote object as if he/she is haptically and visually at the remote station. This tele-presence feeling is achieved by visually registering the head-mounted display of the local user to the remote world and by dynamically registering the local object both visually and haptically with respect to the remote world. This can be achieved by adequate modeling and feedforward compensation including gravity compensation for the robotic manipulator with which the operator interacts. We present multiple scenarios where such a capability will be useful. One is remote design where a user tests a remotely designed docking station by inserting a virtual laptop into a model of the 3D docking station transmitted from a remote site. Medical robotics provides another possible scenario in which a resident is given surgical training to perform a virtual laparoscopy on a 3D exterior model of a patient, including tomographic registration of anatomical structures. We present results from numerous experiments from both the visual and haptic aspects as well as in integrated form. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.