Slaving Head and Eye Movements for Visual Telepresence

This paper describes a system for visual telepresence that copies the motion of an operator’s head onto the neck axes of an electromechanical stereo head/eye platform. Three or more point features on the operator’s head are detected using an external static camera and tracked over time to recover the pose of the operator’s head The process of capturing images, tracking features, recovering pose, and generating demands runs at 50Hz with a latency of 23ms, with the controller and platform typically taking another 20ms to satisfy a demand. Experiments show that the system, including head platform, is able to copy head movements of up to s . The paper goes on to consider the possibility of copying individual eye movements onto the individual camera axes of the head, but simulation studies suggest that delays in the feedback will lead to unsmooth eye response.