Courtesy robotic bodies for small bedridden patients

The scientific literature reports an increasing number of actions aimed at providing mobile robots that allow telepresence experiences to bed-ridden adult patients [1]. A recent review published in BJM Open [2] shows that the use of such robots is increasing very quickly. The nationality of the authors of the articles analyzed in this work is mainly Italy. The use of humanoid and empathic robots such as Nao and Pepper is spreading also in Italian pediatric hospitals. It follows that it is possible and appropriate, as already happens for adults, to use these robots not only for rehabilitation, surgery and distraction [Dawe et al 2019] but also to promote inclusion, by employing them as a telepresence robot. In this case it is no longer the medical-nursing staff that "guides" the robot used for the patient but the patient himself who uses the humanoid robot as a "courtesy body", a robotic avatar, controlled from the bed or from the stay. At present, applications of this kind reported in literature are very scarce and focused exclusively in protected contexts (hospitals and other places of care) but not in other environments (museums, schools, homes for holidays, mountain refuges). The number of articles containing the keywords "robot" and "telepresence" has increased exponentially in the period 2000-2017. Yet, nothing has been published to date regarding the developmental age. The aim of this work was therefore to verify whether, within a pediatric hospital, humanoid robots can have an inclusive role in contexts typical of the developmental age (school, sports, oratory, summer camps). In particular 3 models of humanoid robots were used in extra-hospital settings and remote-controlled by a underage patient. From these preliminary experiences, telepresence robotics carried out with humanoid and empathic robots seems to be promising for hospitalized children. Entrusting a small robot avatar use to each underage patient, with the goal to reach an earlier inclusion, is not only technically possible but also sustainable from the social, economic and environmental points of view. The use of BCI (Brain Computer Interface) technologies in children could make this opportunity universal. References 1. Young J, Langlotz T, Cook M, Mills S, Regenbrecht H. Immersive Telepresence and Remote Collaboration using Mobile and Wearable Devices. IEEE Trans Vis Comput Graph. 2019;25:1908-1918. 2.Dawe J, Sutherland C, Barco A, Broadbent E. Can social robots help children in healthcare contexts? A scoping review. BMJ Paediatr Open. 2018;0:e000371

Removing spatial boundaries in immersive mobile communications

Despite a worldwide trend towards mobile computing, current telepresence experiences focus on stationary desktop computers, limiting how, when, and where researched solutions can be used. In this thesis I demonstrate that mobile phones are a capable platform for future research, showing the effectiveness of the communications possible through their inherent portability and ubiquity. I first describe a framework upon which future systems can be built, which allows two distant users to explore one of several panoramic representations of the local environment by reorienting their device. User experiments demonstrate this framework's ability to induce a sense of presence within the space and between users, and show that capturing this environment live provides no significant benefits over constructing it incrementally. This discovery enables a second application that allows users to explore a three-dimensional representation of their environment. Each user's position is shown as an avatar, with live facial capture to facilitate natural communication. Either may also see the full environment by occupying the same virtual space. This application is also evaluated and shown to provide efficient communications to its users, providing a novel untethered experience not possible on stationary hardware despite the inherent lack of computational ability available on mobile devices

Immersive Telepresence and Remote Collaboration using Mobile and Wearable Devices

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Localisation and tracking of stationary users for extended reality

In this thesis, we investigate the topics of localisation and tracking in the context of Extended Reality. In many on-site or outdoor Augmented Reality (AR) applications, users are standing or sitting in one place and performing mostly rotational movements, i.e. stationary. This type of stationary motion also occurs in Virtual Reality (VR) applications such as panorama capture by moving a camera in a circle. Both applications require us to track the motion of a camera in potentially very large and open environments. State-of-the-art methods such as Structure-from-Motion (SfM), and Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (SLAM), tend to rely on scene reconstruction from significant translational motion in order to compute camera positions. This can often lead to failure in application scenarios such as tracking for seated sport spectators, or stereo panorama capture where the translational movement is small compared to the scale of the environment. To begin with, we investigate the topic of localisation as it is key to providing global context for many stationary applications. To achieve this, we capture our own datasets in a variety of large open spaces including two sports stadia. We then develop and investigate these techniques in the context of these sports stadia using a variety of state-of-the-art localisation approaches. We cover geometry-based methods to handle dynamic aspects of a stadium environment, as well as appearance-based methods, and compare them to a state-of-the-art SfM system to identify the most applicable methods for server-based and on-device localisation. Recent work in SfM has shown that the type of stationary motion that we target can be reliably estimated by applying spherical constraints to the pose estimation. In this thesis, we extend these concepts into a real-time keyframe-based SLAM system for the purposes of AR, and develop a unique data structure for simplifying keyframe selection. We show that our constrained approach can track more robustly in these challenging stationary scenarios compared to state-of-the-art SLAM through both synthetic and real-data tests. In the application of capturing stereo panoramas for VR, this thesis demonstrates the unsuitability of standard SfM techniques for reconstructing these circular videos. We apply and extend recent research in spherically constrained SfM to creating stereo panoramas and compare this with state-of-the-art general SfM in a technical evaluation. With a user study, we show that the motion requirements of our SfM approach are similar to the natural motion of users, and that a constrained SfM approach is sufficient for providing stereoscopic effects when viewing the panoramas in VR