![](bg4.png)
cronous version for this robot can be in the virtual
side. Figures 4 and 5 show the robots running this ex-
periment. In this case we used the the robot located in
our lab ground as representing the real theater and the
avatar of it in the virtual theather room. We are plan-
ning soon the other side of this experience: using the
robot located in the Casa da Ribeira real theater. Note
that we can use the same infrastructure implemented
on the theather for improving a mixed reality play,
where we can envolve real actors (people) interacting
with virtual actors (robots). This virtual actors can be
any person located in anywhere incarnating a robot
avatar. Other intersting application of this structure
is to improve a real-virtual bridge, im other words, to
improve a communication tool for connecting people
located in different spaces. In that way the robots will
be used as the connection channel.
Figure 5: Virtual robot performing in the theater, in a syn-
chronized way.
4 CONCLUSIONS AND
PERSPECTIVES
We developed and tested several tools for allowing
control of both virtual and real versions of robots and
users connected through internet. The developed tools
allow us to provide interactions with users, robots and
avatars through the WWW in several ways. An exam-
ple of an application devised involving both real and
virtual sides is to have a robot as an avatar in a real
museum for a human connected through the internet
in a virtual museum. In this case, the robot could have
an autonomous behavior (to follow a given museum
route tour), learned through several trials were the
robot takes user preferences. Then, as a human enters
the virtual museum, a robot is allocated to it in the real
version of the museum. The robot starts following the
traced route, according to the user preference. As the
robot approach a picture, the human user may use the
remote control, for example, to examine a given pic-
ture with more detail. Note that several robots could
be present representing several humans. As the num-
ber of robots expires, a new user could be represented
by a virtual avatar (without phisical entities represent-
ing it). In this case, the robots must know that there
is another user (avatar) close to them (augmented re-
ality for the robots). We will shortly run experiments
involving robots performing as actors in the Casa da
Ribeira Theater. Besides the above applications, sev-
eral other involving a mix between real and virtual
parts could take place. As a future application exam-
ple, we plan to use this system in order to transmit,
through the internet robot contests. This will include
robot soccer and other versions of games for robots.
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