Tele-museum: multimedia interface and control for exploring a remote museum from home

This paper presents the design and implementation of a telepresence system, where a mobile manipulator robot is utilized to explore a museum at a remote site, sending live video, and audio on demand to a user at the local site. The user is capable of remote manipulation through the robot. The user is monitored and human intention understanding is utilized to enhance the human-robot communication. The multimedia interface and control of the system are described, allowing for the integration and fusing of the intelligence of the local human user with the intelligence of the remote robot. Research issues in achieving high fidelity telepresence are also discussed.