To ensure the reliability of an extraterrestrial lander during its touchdown process, it is crucial to replicate the landing dynamics within a simulated low-gravity environment. In this study, a servo-driven system(SDS) is proposed and integrated with a quasi-zero stiffness(QZS) system to address the limitations of traditional methods, including restricted accuracy and limited movement range. An analytical method for describing the dynamic characteristics of the low-gravity simulation system is presented based on passivity theory, enhancing the compensation accuracy. Subsequently, a fuzzy controller for the QZS-SDS composite system is designed to autonomously adjust the equilibrium point and convergence speed, ensuring rapid error reduction in tension control. Furthermore, the global asymptotic stability conditions of the closed-loop system are established and analyzed, and the quantitative parameter design guidelines for practical implementation are provided. Finally, a series of physical experiments demonstrate the efficiency and robustness of the proposed system. Compared to conventional methods using only QZS, the proposed approach reduces the maximum force compensation error from 13.9% to 4.0%, and extends the supported simulation range from 800mm to over 12,000mm.

The fusion of images from dual camera systems featuring a wide-angle and a telephoto camera has become a hotspot problem recently. By integrating simultaneously captured wide-angle and telephoto images from these systems, the resulting fused image achieves a wide field of view (FOV) coupled with high-definition quality. Existing approaches are mostly deep learning methods, and predominantly rely on supervised learning, where the training dataset plays a pivotal role. However, current datasets typically adopt a data synthesis approach, where the wide-angle inputs are synthesized rather than captured using real wide-angle cameras, and the ground-truth image is captured by wide-angle cameras whose quality is substantially lower than that of input telephoto images captured by telephoto cameras. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel hardware setup utilizing a beam splitter to simultaneously capture three images, i.e. input pairs and ground-truth images, from two authentic cellphones equipped with wide-angle and telephoto dual cameras. Specifically, the wide-angle and telephoto images captured by cellphone 2 serve as the input pair, while the telephoto image captured by cellphone 1, which is calibrated to match the optical path of the wide-angle image from cellphone 2, serves as the ground-truth image, maintaining quality on par with the input telephoto image. Experiments validate the efficacy of our newly introduced dataset, named ReWiTe, which can significantly enhance the performance of various existing methods for the real-world wide-angle and telephoto dual image fusion task.

Current co-speech gestures synthesis methods struggle with generating diverse motions and typically collapse to single or few frequent motion sequences, which are trained on original data distribution with customized models and strategies. We tackle this problem by temporally clustering motion sequences into content and rhythm segments and then training on content-balanced data distribution. In particular, by clustering motion sequences, we have observed for each rhythm pattern, some motions appear frequently, while others appear less. This imbalance results in the difficulty of generating low frequent occurrence motions and it cannot be easily solved by resampling, due to the inherent many-to-many mapping between content and rhythm. Therefore, we present DisCo, which disentangles motion into implicit content and rhythm features by contrastive loss for adopting different data balance strategies. Besides, to model the inherent mapping between content and rhythm features, we design a diversity-and-inclusion network (DIN), which firstly generates content features candidates and then selects one candidate by learned voting. Experiments on two public datasets, Trinity and S2G-Ellen, justify that DisCo generates more realistic and diverse motions than state-of-the-art methods. Code and data are available at https://pantomatrix.github.io/DisCo/

In this paper, we present a novel collaboration tool, OmniGlobeVR, which is an asymmetric system that supports communication and collaboration between a VR user (occupant) and multiple non-VR users (designers) across the virtual and physical platform. OmniGlobeVR allows designer(s) to explore the VR space from any point of view using two view modes: a 360° first-person mode and a third-person mode. In addition, a shared gaze awareness cue is provided to further enhance communication between the occupant and the designer(s). Finally, the system has a face window feature that allows designer(s) to share their facial expressions and upper body view with the occupant for exchanging and expressing information using nonverbal cues. We conducted a user study to evaluate the OmniGlobeVR, comparing three conditions: (1) first-person mode with the face window, (2) first-person mode with a solid window, and (3) third-person mode with the face window. We found that the first-person mode with the face window required significantly less mental effort, and provided better spatial presence, usability, and understanding of the partner's focus. We discuss the design implications of these results and directions for future research.

Video communication systems have been suffered from the narrow field of view. To solve this limitation, one study proposed symmetric 360° video communication system by combining an omnidirectional camera and a hemispherical display. However, the system still had several issues, e.g., the invisibility of hemisphere which was at the opposite side from a user caused the inconvenience of observing the remote environment. To solve these issues, we introduce OmniGlobe, a novel symmetric full 360° video communication system which incorporates an omnidirectional camera, a full spherical display, and several visual or interactive techniques. Based on an experiment, we could indicate that our system is effective in reducing the inconvenience of observing the remote environment and increased the remote space awareness and user's gaze awareness to support remote collaboration. We also discuss the takeaways, limitations and application areas in our system which help improve the system.

Field-of-view limitation has been a long-standing issue in video communication systems. With the advancement of omnidirectional panoramic technology, the omnidirectional camera, which can provide a 360° field of view, has become increasingly popular in the last few years. Previous research indicated that one-way video communication systems with a wider field of view improve task efficiency. Therefore, we propose to utilize omnidirectional cameras in a symmetrical video communication system and study how this configuration affects remote collaboration. In this study, we conducted experiments based on two conditions, which are an omnidirectional camera with a spherical display and an omnidirectional camera with a horizontally placed 2D flat display. Under these conditions, we analyzed how the display types affected remote collaboration. Our results show that participants marginally preferred the spherical display to the 2D flat display. We also show the advantages and disadvantages of each display. The findings contribute to our understanding of how to design an environment for remote collaboration that captures and shows a 360° panoramic view of a remote site.

This paper considers the problem of tracking a network-wide solution that dynamically minimizes the summation of time-varying local cost functions of agents, when some of the agents are malfunctioning. The malfunctioning agents broadcast faulty values to their neighbors, and lead the optimization process to a wrong direction. To mitigate the influence of the malfunctioning agents, we propose a total variation (TV) norm regularized formulation that drives the local variables of the regular agents to be close, while allows them to be different with the faulty values broadcast by the malfunctioning agents. We give a sufficient condition under which consensus of the regular agents is guaranteed, and bound the gap between the consensual solution and the optimal solution we pursue as if the malfunctioning agents do not exist. A fully decentralized subgradient algorithm is proposed to solve the TV norm regularized problem in a dynamic manner. At every time, every regular agent only needs one subgradient evaluation of its current local cost function, in addition to combining messages received from neighboring regular and malfunctioning agents. The tracking error is proved to be bounded, given that the variation of the optimal solution is bounded. Numerical experiments demonstrate the robust tracking performance of the proposed algorithm at presence of the malfunctioning agents.

We propose OmniEyeball (OEB), which is a novel interactive 360° image I/O system combining a spherical display system with an omnidirectional camera. We also present our experimental design of a user interface on the OEB, including a vision-based touch detection technique as well as several visual and interactive features. Our proposed techniques may contribute to solving the weak awareness of the opposite side of the spherical display as well as the workload caused by walking around in the 360° symmetric video communication.

We present a sphere-shaped interactive display system, named Qoom, as a new input and output device. Unlike existing sphere-shaped displays, Qoom is a perfectly spherical ball that can be rotated, thrown, or even kicked. First, we discuss how spherical displays can be used in daily life and describe how users interact with spheres. Then, we show how we developed the Qoom prototype that uses touch and rotation detection, real-time object tracking, and spherical projection mapping. We implemented actions including touching, rotating, bouncing and throwing as controls. We also developed applications for Qoom that utilize the unique advantages of ball displays.