This is the first year funding of a three year continuing award. With the spread of personal computers and ubiquitous networking, computing has become a consumer technology. This growth was fed by demand for a new kind of computing: computers as *communication and information management tools*. But for a variety of reasons, no current technology is a reasonable substitute for face-to-face communication. The ultimate computer-mediated communication form is telepresence via a robotic proxy. Many aspects of communication are possible only with this medium, and a precise characterization of those capabilities is the subject of this project. The project relies heavily on concepts from the disciplines of inter-personal psychology and non-verbal communication. The former discipline deals with people's perception of a communication experience, how accurately they perceived the other person's intention, disposition, and emotions. Non-verbal communication studies the role of particular cues, like gaze, gesture and posture, in contributing to a communication experience. In this research, telerobots are called "PRoPs'' for Personal Roving Presence. The name emphasizes the personal connection between the pilot and the robot, and that the robot is not an autonomous agent, but a manifestation (a presence) of its pilot. The project focuses on telepresence in the workplace, and within that category, on informational (office) workplaces and laboratories (which involve more interaction with objects). The main research issues to be explored are: (i) generating and controlling non-verbal communication cues, especially spatialized ones such as gaze and gesturing (ii) easy and intuitive navigation and (iii) affective haptics. The social contexts to be explored are (i) communication (ii) persuasion and (iii) trust-building.
