A Novel Haptic Interface for Free Locomotion in Extended Range Telepresence Scenarios

Telepresence gives a user the impression of actually being present in a distant environment. A mobile teleoperator acts as a proxy in this target environment, replicates the user's motion, and records sensory information, which is transferred to the user and displayed in real-time. As a result the user is immersed in the target environment. The user can then control the teleoperator by walking naturally. Motion Compression, a nonlinear mapping between the user's and the robot's motion, allows exploration of large target environments even from small user environments. For manipulation tasks haptic feedback is important. However, current haptic displays do not allow wide-area motion. In this work we present our design of a novel haptic display for simultaneous wide area motion and haptic interaction.