Telepresence robots are becoming popular in social interactions involving health care, elderly assistance, guidance, or office meetings. There are two types of human psychological experiences to consider in robot-mediated interactions: (1) telepresence, in which a user develops a sense of being present near the remote interlocutor, and (2) co-presence, in which a user perceives the other person as being present locally with him or her. This work presents a literature review on developments supporting robotic social interactions, contributing to improving the sense of presence and co-presence via robot mediation. This survey aims to define social presence, co-presence, identify autonomous “user-adaptive systems” for social robots, and propose a taxonomy for “co-presence” mechanisms. It presents an overview of social robotics systems, applications areas, and technical methods and provides directions for telepresence and co-presence robot design given the actual and future challenges. Finally, we suggest evaluation guidelines for these systems, having as reference face-to-face interaction.

Human-machine interfaces play a crucial role in intervention robotic systems operated in hazardous environments, such as deep sea conditions. This article introduces a user interface abstraction layer to enhance reconfigurability. It also describes a VR-based interface that utilizes immersive technologies to reduce user faults and mental fatigue. The goal is to show the user only the most relevant information about the current mission.

Transferring skills and expertise to remote places, without being present, is a new challenge for our digitally interconnected society. People can experience and perform actions in distant places through a robotic agent wearing immersive interfaces to feel physically there. However, technological contingencies can affect human perception, compromising skill-based performances. Considering the results from studies on human factors, a set of recommendations for the construction of immersive teleoperation systems is provided, followed by an example of the evaluation methodology. We developed a testbed to study perceptual issues that affect task performance while users manipulated the environment either through traditional or immersive interfaces. The analysis of its effect on perception, navigation, and manipulation relies on performances measures and subjective answers. The goal is to mitigate the effect of factors such as system latency, field of view, frame of reference, or frame rate to achieve the sense of telepresence. By decoupling the flows of an immersive teleoperation system, we aim to understand how vision and interaction fidelity affects spatial cognition. Results show that misalignments between the frame of reference for vision and motor-action or the use of tools affecting the sense of body position or movement have a higher effect on mental workload and spatial cognition.

This paper investigates approaches capable of inducing sensations of tele-presence in robotic tele-operations. Operator's control actions are simpler, if he feels being in the remote environment. The goal is to replicate some conditions of the remote environment to let operator's perception behaviours approximate to the natural ones. Since immersion aims at providing stimulus to trick the sensory system, we pursue a consistency between outside sensory feedbacks and inside sensory proprioceptive, vestibular information and cognitive models. Seeking operations enhancement, we explore the embodiment concept by virtually place the operator inside the robot. This research develops and evaluates natural-based interfaces for immersive tele-operation. The results indicate a decrease in cognitive workload with gains in task performance.

This paper proposes a new interaction mechanism for tele-operating a mobile robot. The approach explores the notion of telepresence and physical embodiment to create what may be called tele-embodiment. Its principle is that the operator will see himself at the remote site and this will enable him/her to better operate the robot. Four interaction styles were experimentally compared, from the traditional joystick approaches to more innovative based on natural body posture intentions. The environment perception is provided by the visual feedback, according to head pose behaviour. The results show that the gesture and body based methods improves the user dexterity performing this kind of task. Moreover, the present study suggests that, when a person is focused on the task, achieving the ownership illusion towards remote body, there are autonomic responses that correspond to what would be expected in events that take place in reality (like avoiding collisions).