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Telepresent walking allows visits to remote places such as museums, exhibitions, architecture, or industrial sites with a high degree of realism. While walking freely around in the user environment, the user sees the remote environment through the "eyes" of a remote mobile teleoperator. For that purpose, the user's motion is tracked and transferred to the teleoperator. Without additional processing of the motion data, the size of the remote environment to be explored is limited to the size of the user environment. This paper proposes an extension of telepresent walking to arbitrarily large remote or virtual spaces based on compressing wide-area motion into the available user space. Motion compression is a novel approach and does not make use of scaling or walking-in-place metaphors. Rather, motion compression introduces some deviation of curvature between user motion and teleoperator motion. An optimization approach is used to nd the user path of minimum curvature deviation with respect to a given predicted teleoperator path that ts inside the boundaries of the user environment. Turning angles and travel distances are mapped with a 1:1 ratio to provide the desired impression of realistic selflocomotion in the teleoperator's environment. The effects of the curvature deviation on inconsistent perception of locomotion are studied in two experiments.

Abstract. Nonlinear hybrid dynamical systems are the main focus of this paper. A modeling framework is proposed, feedback control strategies and numerical solution methods for optimal control problems in this setting are introduced, and their implementation with various illustrative applications are presented. Hybrid dynamical systems are characterized by discrete event and continuous dynamics which have an interconnected structure and can thus represent an extremely wide range of systems of practical interest. Consequently, many modeling and control methods have surfaced for these problems. This work is particularly focused on systems for which the degree of discrete/continuous interconnection is comparatively strong and the continuous portion of the dynamics may be highly nonlinear and of high dimension. The hybrid optimal control problem is defined and two solution techniques for obtaining suboptimal solutions are presented (both based on numerical direct collocation for continuous dynamic optimization): one fixes interior point constraints on a grid, another uses branch-and-bound. These are applied to a robotic multi-arm transport task, an underactuated robot arm, and a benchmark motorized traveling salesman problem.

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Abstract-In this paper, we present the two-dimensional (2-D) version of the symmetries and perturbation model (SPmodel), a probabilistic representation model and an EKF integration mechanism for uncertain geometric information that is suitable for sensor fusion and integration in multisensor systems. We apply the SPmodel to the problem of location estimation in indoor mobile robotics, experimenting with the mobile robot MAC-ROBE. We have chosen two types of complementary sensory information: 1) range images; 2) intensity images; obtained from a laser sensor. Results of these experiments show that fusing simple and computationally inexpensive sensory information can allow a mobile robot to precisely locate itself. They also demonstrate the generality of the proposed fusion and integration mechanism.Index Terms-Computer vision, map-based localization, mobile robots, range finder, sensor fusion.