The automotive industry has seen an uprise in autonomous vehicles that will change the operators’ work environment. Volvo Autonomous Solutions aims to create a seamless user experience with environmentally and socially sustainable solutions. The vehicles should operate fully autonomously, but scenarios will emerge where remote operation is required. The master thesis aims to identify the requirements for the interaction between human and autonomous vehicles, and develop an interaction solution for remote operation. The study focused on safety, perception, situation awareness, and user experience. The subject was analyzed using user studies, literature reviews, and benchmarking. Twenty people participated in interviews, and a key user was identified, together with four human intervention scenarios. The data resulted in a list of general insights, which developed into requirements for designing remote operation interactions. An exploration of solutions for human-machine interaction was iterated and evaluated by 31 participants. The final recommendation included a requirements list for the design of the interaction with remote operation and a proposed interaction concept, illustrating a design proposal to meet these requirements. The study identified the following aspects to consider when developing an interaction solution for remote control of autonomous vehicles: Navigation, Steering, and Acceleration, Safety, and Perception and Situation Awareness. The final concept for remote operation interaction consisted of a rotational motion, a lever motion, and a digital touch display. / Fordonsindustrin har sett ett enormt lyft inom autonoma fordon, vilket kommer påverka operatörernas arbetsmiljö och sätt att arbeta. Volvo Autonomous Solutions har som mål att skapa en problemfri användarupplevelse och hållbara lösningar. Målet är att fordonen ska fungera autonomt, men det kommer alltid uppstå scenarier där fjärrstyrning kommer krävas. Syftet med examensarbetet är att identifiera kraven för interaktionen mellan människa och autonomt fordon, samt att utveckla en interaktionslösning för fjärrstyrning. Studierna fokuserade på aspekter inom säkerhet, perception, situationsmedvetenhet och användarupplevelse. Ett flertal användarstudier, genomgång av befintlig litteratur, benchmarking, samt identifiering och undersökning av olika scenarier genomfördes. 20 personer intervjuades och en nyckelanvändare samt fyra scenarier för mänskligt ingripande identifierades. Resultaten gav allmänna insikter, vilka utvecklades till en kravlista för design av en interaktionslösning för fjärrstyrning. Vidare utforskades lösningar för människa-maskin interaktion där fyra koncept itererades och utvärderades av 31 deltagare. Slutligen presenterades en rekommendation och kravspecifikation för utformningen av interaktionen, samt ett interaktionskoncept för design av fjärrstyrningsinteraktion enligt uppställda krav. Studien identifierade följande aspekter att ta hänsyn till vid utveckling av en interaktionslösning för fjärrstyrning av autonoma fordon: Navigation, Styrning och Acceleration, Säkerhet och Perception och Situationsmedvetenhet. Det slutliga konceptet till fjärrstyrningsinteraktion bestod av en rotationsrörelse, en spak-rörelse och en digital display.

During face-to-face meetings, humans use multimodal information, including verbal information, visual information, body language, facial expressions, and other non-verbal gestures. In contrast, during computer-mediated-communication (CMC), humans rely either on mono-modal information such as text-only, voice-only, or video-only or on bi-modal information by using audiovisual modalities such as video teleconferencing. Psychologically, the difference between the two lies in the level of the subjective experience of presence, where people perceive a reduced feeling of presence in the case of CMC. Despite the current advancements in CMC, it is still far from face-to-face communication, especially in terms of the experience of presence. This thesis aims to introduce new concepts, theories, and technologies for presence design where the core is actions for creating presence. Thus, the contribution of the thesis can be divided into a technical contribution and a knowledge contribution. Technically, this thesis details novel technologies for improving presence experience during mediated communication (video teleconferencing). The proposed technologies include action robots (including a telepresence mechatronic robot (TEBoT) and a face robot), embodied control techniques (head orientation modeling and virtual reality headset based collaboration), and face reconstruction/retrieval algorithms. The introduced technologies enable action possibilities and embodied interactions that improve the presence experience between the distantly located participants. The novel setups were put into real experimental scenarios, and the well-known social, spatial, and gaze related problems were analyzed. The developed technologies and the results of the experiments led to the knowledge contribution of this thesis. In terms of knowledge contribution, this thesis presents a more general theoretical conceptual framework for mediated communication technologies. This conceptual framework can guide telepresence researchers toward the development of appropriate technologies for mediated communication applications. Furthermore, this thesis also presents a novel strong concept – presence through actions - that brings in philosophical understandings for developing presence- related technologies. The strong concept - presence through actions is an intermediate-level knowledge that proposes a new way of creating and developing future 'presence artifacts'. Presence- through actions is an action-oriented phenomenological approach to presence that differs from traditional immersive presence approaches that are based (implicitly) on rationalist, internalist views.

The introduction of this document presents some basic principles of visual telepresence with analysis of important aspects of the design. Afterwards there is a brief ovrewview of some of the applications of telepresence systems. Subsequently there is a description of the basic parameters and functions of the human visual perception system including the head motion parameters. This document examines the creation of telepresence apparatus through which is the user able to percieve visual stimuli accross distance. The device consist of camera with wide FOV positioned on the last link of the servo-motor chain with 3 DOF. Camera view is projected into scene in position read from actual motor posture. The scene is perceived through the HMD Oculus Rift (DK1, DK2) where the actual head-orientation read from the HMD inertial sensors is the entered end value for the rotation angles of the servomotors. A \csharp (WPF) program was developed for the controling and setting of motors which handles the byte communication through RS485-USB converter and also configures and starts the telepresence mode. The telepresence scene is drawn with help of SharpDX and SharpOVR - the \csharp wrappers of DirectX and LibOVR.

Availability of internet to a wide audiences has revolutionized how business is performed. Businesses now use e-commerce to trade products and services. The growth of e-commerce has been dramatically rapid among developed countries. Therefore, the adoption of e-commerce platforms is studied in these countries. Meanwhile less attentions has been given to developing countries. Developing countries can take advantage of lessons learned in the developed countries. One of the major success factors of e-commerce platforms in developed countries is improving the usability of e-commerce platform by considering user’s preferences. User preferences can be defined as feelings and attitudes of users for the interface and functional design of the ecommerce platform. This influences user’s decision and behavior. Considering the users preferences within an e-commerce platform enhances user’s satisfaction and increases user’s loyalty to the platform. To evaluate the user preferences a selection of usability factors are usually studied. Avicenna Research Institute (ARI) is currently considering the development of an e-commerce platform. For this ARI is investigating ways to consider users preferences in the design. This study aims to satisfy this goal. In this study previous research are analyzed, user’s preferences are identified, common used e-commerce platforms are investigated, and ARI’s perspective is included in the analysis. Using these information a set of recommendations on how to improve the usability of an e-commerce platform is given. For this task based approaches are used in form of participatory heuristic evaluation and observations. Interview is used to obtain ARI’s perspective on usability. The study has identified ten usability factors affecting the usability of the e-commerce platform based on user’s preferences. These include consistency, learnability, navigability, simplicity, readability, content relevance, supportability, interactivity, credibility, and telepresence. In addition a set of eighty evaluation criteria are presented to evaluate these factors. Using a qualitative approach, the study has analyzed all these factors in a multiple-case study. The analysis includes input from the users in form of observations, comments and questionnaire. This is combined with input from ARI in form of interviews. Finally the study concludes by providing a path for future research.

服務接觸是行銷活動的重要關鍵，過去已有許多的研究探討實體商業環境下的服務接觸。然而，隨著寬頻的普及與資訊科技的發展，電子商務已逐漸成為民眾日常消費的模式之一，但研究上卻缺乏對於網路服務接觸的深入探討。為釐清網路服務接觸之特性，本研究首先引用遙距臨場感的概念，分析消費者使用網站服務的虛擬體驗，並進一步探討網站的生動性與互動性對於網路服務接觸臨場感的影響，以及網路服務接觸臨場感對於網路服務品質及網路忠誠度的影響。 本研究以學生及實務界人士為樣本，透過線性結構方程式驗證相關假說及理論架構。結果發現網站上生動性與互動性的搭配可以對網路服務接觸臨場感產生正向的影響，說明網站經營者可以藉由生動性與互動性的操作來提高消費者對於網路服務接觸臨場感的感受，讓消費者在網站的使用過程中，可以有更接近真實的體驗。此外，研究結果亦發現生動性不僅可以提高網路服接觸臨場感的程度，同時也會有助於提高網站的互動性。其次本研究之結果發現，網路服務接觸臨場感程度愈高，則網路的服務品質也會跟著增加，同時還可以進一步提高消費者對於網站的忠誠度。 本研究之結果，進一步發展出經驗性產品網站開發技術的採用原則，網站開發過程中，應先考量技術的互動性效果，其次再考量生動技術的搭配。亦暨網站開發人員在技術成本的考量下，應先設法滿足消費者對於互動性的需求，而無需過度追求炫麗的多媒體效果。 最後，於研究過程中，因考量到過去相關研究中對生動性構念的衡量缺乏多構面之量表，故本研究亦透過專家訪談及問卷前測分析，發展出具多構面特性之生動性量表，足以做為後續研究使用。

The subject of this master's thesis was to get familiar with a robot developed at the Department of Intelligent Systems of FIT VUT Brno. The goal of this work was to design and then implement hardware and software improvements of the robot so it could be capable of telepresence exploration of a narrow cave using remote control, including autonomous return back to the entrance. Also suggest possible extensions for a further improvement of the robot.

This work is to investigate the performance of two Kalman Filter Algorithms, namely Linear Kalman Filter and Extended Kalman Filter on control-based human motion prediction in a real-time teleoperation. The Kalman Filter Algorithm has been widely used in research areas of motion tracking and GPS-navigation. However, the potential of human motion prediction by utilizing this algorithm is rarely being mentioned. Combine with the known issue - the delay issue in today’s teleoperation services, the author decided to build a prototype of simple teleoperation model based on the Kalman Filter Algorithm with the aim of eliminated the unsynchronization between the user’s inputs and the visual frames, where all the data were transferred over the network. In the first part of the thesis, two types of Kalman Filter Algorithm are applied on the prototype to predict the movement of the robotic arm based on the user’s motion applied on a Haptic Device. The comparisons in performance among the Kalman Filters have also been focused. In the second part, the thesis focuses on optimizing the motion prediction which based on the results of Kalman filtering by using the smoothing algorithm. The last part of the thesis examines the limitation of the prototype, such as how much the delays are accepted and how fast the movement speed of the Phantom Haptic can be, to still be able to obtain reasonable predations with acceptable error rate.   The results show that the Extended Kalman Filter has achieved more advantages in motion prediction than the Linear Kalman Filter during the experiments. The unsynchronization issue has been effectively improved by applying the Kalman Filter Algorithm on both state and measurement models when the latency is set to below 200 milliseconds. The additional smoothing algorithm further increases the accuracy. More important, it also solves shaking issue on the visual frames on robotic arm which is caused by the wavy property of the Kalman Filter Algorithm. Furthermore, the optimization method effectively synchronizes the timing when robotic arm touches the interactable object in the prediction.   The method which is utilized in this research can be a good reference for the future researches in control-based human motion tracking and prediction. / Detta arbete fokuserar på att undersöka prestandan hos två Kalman Filter Algoritmer, nämligen Linear Kalman Filter och Extended Kalman Filter som används i realtids uppskattningar av kontrollbaserad mänsklig rörelse i teleoperationen. Dessa Kalman Filter Algoritmer har används i stor utsträckning forskningsområden i rörelsespårning och GPS-navigering. Emellertid är potentialen i uppskattning av mänsklig rörelse genom att utnyttja denna algoritm sällan nämnas. Genom att kombinera med det kända problemet – fördröjningsproblem i dagens teleoperation tjänster beslutar författaren att bygga en prototyp av en enkel teleoperation modell vilket är baserad på Kalman Filter algoritmen i syftet att eliminera icke-synkronisering mellan användarens inmatningssignaler och visuella information, där alla data överfördes via nätverket. I den första delen av avhandlingen appliceras både Kalman Filter Algoritmer på prototypen för att uppskatta rörelsen av robotarmen baserat på användarens rörelse som anbringas på en haptik enhet. Jämförelserna i prestandan bland de Kalman Filter Algoritmerna har också fokuserats. I den andra delen fokuserar avhandlingen på att optimera uppskattningar av rörelsen som baserat på resultaten av Kalman-filtrering med hjälp av en utjämningsalgoritm. Den sista delen av avhandlingen undersökes begräsning av prototypen, som till exempel hur mycket fördröjningar accepteras och hur snabbt den haptik enheten kan vara, för att kunna erhålla skäliga uppskattningar med acceptabel felfrekvens.   Resultaten visar att den Extended Kalman Filter har bättre prestandan i rörelse uppskattningarna än den Linear Kalman Filter under experimenten. Det icke-synkroniseringsproblemet har förbättrats genom att tillämpa de Kalman Filter Algoritmerna på både statliga och värderingsmodeller när latensen är inställd på under 200 millisekunder. Den extra utjämningsalgoritmen ökar ytterligare noggrannheten. Denna algoritm löser också det skakande problem hos de visuella bilder på robotarmen som orsakas av den vågiga egenskapen hos Kalman Filter Algoritmen. Dessutom effektivt synkroniserar den optimeringsmetoden tidpunkten när robotarmen berör objekten i uppskattningarna.   Den metod som används i denna forskning kan vara en god referens för framtida undersökningar i kontrollbaserad rörelse- spåning och uppskattning.

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Das Medizinische Interprofessionelle Trainingszentrum (MITZ) ist ein Skills Lab, in welchem Studierende (ST) praktische und kommunikative Kompetenzen für ihren späteren Berufsalltag erlernen. Bedingt durch die COVID-19-Pandemie musste sich das MITZ mit neuen Möglichkeiten der Teilhabe an der Lehre auseinandersetzen (Röhle, 2021) und pilotierte dies mit der Anschaffung von zwei Telepräsenzrobotern (TPR). TPR sind mobile Remote-Präsenz-Systeme, welche neben der klassischen Videokonferenz den ST zusätzlich die Möglichkeit geben, sich autonom zu bewegen (Wolff & Möller, 2021). Dadurch wird die informelle Kommunikation und der Austausch unterstützt (Lee & Takayama, 2011), deren Fehlen ST während des Studiums in Zeiten der COVID-19-Pandemie als besonders herausfordernd empfunden haben (Traus et al., 2020). Im Folgenden wird die Pilotierung des Einsatzes von Telepräsenzrobotern in der medizinischen Lehre vorgestellt. [Aus: Hintergrund]

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