The project seeks to develop new means to establish functional presence for remote robot handlers and problem holders and to study how enhanced functional presence supports coordinated activity in teams of people and robots such as in urban operations, search and rescue and first response.

The Remote Perception problem: The cues to depth are limited or ambiguous when exploring a remote environment from the video provided by a robot. This limited visual information leads to various difficulties for robot handlers, including misperceived scale of obstacles or passages being traversed by a robot, and difficulty creating mental maps of the remote environment. This project is developing several promising concepts to enhance remote perception based on new multi-camera visual displays such as multi-view and spherical perspective folding. Studying functional presence required development of test bed and simulation capabilities. A rapid prototyping virtual environment for studying functional presence is being developed as well based on the Raven shield game engine.