Advances in robotics and multisensory displays allow extending telepresence ambitions beyond only "the feeling of being present at a remote location". In this paper, we discuss what may lie beyond telepresence and how we can transport both the functional and social self of a user. We introduce the embodiment illusion and its potential contribution to task performance and list important cues to evoke this illusion, including synchronicity in multisensory information, a firstperson visual perspective, and a human-like visual appearance and anatomy of the telepresence robot. We also introduce the concept of social presence and the important bidirectional social cues it needs, including eye contact, facial expression, posture, gestures, and social touch. For all these multisensory and social cues, we explain how they can be implemented in a telepresence system and describe our solution consisting of a closed control pod and a humanoid telepresence robot.

Humans have multiple ways to adapt their arm dynamics to the task they have to perform. One way of doing this is through co-contraction of antagonist muscles. In telemanipulation this ability is easily lost due to time delays, quantization effects, bandwidth or hardware limitations. In this work a new concept for telemanipulation is presented. The end-point stiffness of a (simulated) telerobot is controlled via a variable impedance controller. The end effector stiffness scales with an estimate of the co-contraction around the elbow of the teleoperator. The telemanipulation concept was evaluated with ten subjects that performed two telemanipulation tasks in six different conditions. Three impedance levels: low, high, and variable, and two delay settings. The first task was on positioning accuracy, the second task on impact minimization. We have shown that low and variable impedance performed significantly better on the force task than high impedance. We have also shown that high and variable impedance performed significantly better on the position task than low impedance. This shows that the human ability to control arm stiffness can effectively be transferred to a telemanipulated robot.

A serious problem with using electrical actuators in legged locomotion is the significant energy loss. For this reason, we propose and analyse an alternative means of actuation: Controlled Passive Actuation. Controlled Passive Actuation aims at reducing the energy flow through electric actuators by actuating with a combination of an energy storage element and a Continuously Variable Transmission. In this work, we present a method where we apply a Continuously Variable Transmission with a storage element in the form of a mass to change the state of another mass (“the load”). An abstraction layer is created to abstract the inertia-driven Controlled Passive Actuation to a source of effort, a force actuator. On this abstracted system, feedback control can be applied to achieve control goals such as path tracking. With simulations and experiments, we show that inertia-driven Controlled Passive Actuation can be used to control the state of an (inertial) load. The experimental results show that the performance of the system is affected by the internal dynamics and limited rate of change of the transmission ratio of the Continuously Variable Transmission.

Implementing energy-based controllers in software represents a challenge for software engineers, as additional expertise is required to abide by the physics-domain constraints of energy exchange in the design and structure of the control software. Our paper bridges the gap between software engineering and the physics domain by conveying energy exchange to controlsoftware modelling. We use principles of physical systems and the bond-graph modelling language to identify the mechanisms and constraints of energy exchange and represent them as datacommunication services for software models. This work resulted in metamodels and models for power and energy communication that can facilitate the first-time-right implementation of robotcontrol software.

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