TIUI: Touching Live Video for Telepresence Operation

This paper presents a framework for telepresence operation by touching live video on a touchscreen. Our goal is to enable users to use a smartpad to teleoperate everyday objects by touching the objects live video they are watching. To this end, we coined the term teleinteractive device to describe such an object with an identity, an actuator, and a communication network. We developed a touchable live video image-based user interface (TIUI) that empowers users to teleoperate any teleinteractive device by touching its live video with touchscreen gestures. The TIUI contains four modules touch, control, recognition, and knowledge to perform live video understanding, communication, and control for telepresence operation. We implemented a telepresence operation system that consists of a telepresence robot and teleinteractive devices at a local site, a smartpad with the TIUI at a remote site, and communication networks connecting the two sites. We demonstrated potential applications of the system in remotely controlling telepresence robots, opening doors with access control panels, and pushing power wheelchairs. We conducted user studies to show the effectiveness of the proposed framework.