Tele-existence and its Applications to the Supervisory Tasks

摘要

This paper first explains the concept of tele-existence, high-lighting one of the features of virtual reality, which focuses on the aspect of the remote operations with reality. This has been the key technology for handling operations in extreme environments, such as teleoperation in space. With improved hardware specification and lower price, this technology has recently attracted attention for supervisory tasks combined with IT technology. Tele-existence consists of three elementary subsystems: Sensing, Display, and Simulation. After sensing an operator's movement as inputs, the system simulates changes. It then displays the changes, mainly visually or acoustically, to the operator. After explaining the three elementary subsystems, the functional structure is pointed out. The structure has two modes: basic and advanced. Several cases, one of which is still under research level, are discussed with a view to identifying future applications. The future direction for cost-effective tele-existence will be web based teleoperation.