TELEOPERATION, TELEROBOTICS AND TELEPRESENCE - A PROGRESS REPORT

This paper briefly surveys and reports progress in the field of teleop eration, meaning human control of remote sensors and actuators. Includ ed is the subclass of teleoperation called telerobotics, which means h uman supervisory control of remote semiautomatic systems, and the phen omenon of telepresence, in which special sensing and display technolog y enables the human to feel present at the remote location even though not really there. Current and new applications are reviewed. Techniqu es for human-computer cooperation in planning, commanding, and sensing are described. The telerobot is considered as a paradigm for any comp lex vehicle or process having many separate automatic control loops al l of which are supervised by a human; some current examples are presen ted. Finally, opinions are given as to the current status of the field .