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tion of a mobile robot.
Augmented reality consists in enhancing a real world representa-
tion with virtual graphical additions. It gives the possibility to display
sensor data together with visual data in an intuitive and quickly com-
prehensible way. Up to now, AR has found application in several fields.
It can be used in medical and manufacturing fields for intuitive training
and for assistance during precision tasks, or to display annotations over
the real workspace in collaborative applications. It is frequently used in
military (e.g. Head-Up Displays for aircraft and helicopter pilots) and
commercial applications, e.g. to enhance sporting events on television
[14, 15]. Numerous applications of augmented reality in robotics are
found in literature. It has been frequently used to introduce visual aids
into telemanipulation tasks [16–18], to facilitate robot programming
[19–21] or to assist mobile robots teleguide [9, 22–26].
Stereoscopic visualization is today well-known thanks to the spread
of “3D movies”. Stereoscopy is a group of technologies which permit
to reproduce the tridimensional depth effect given by binocular vision
using a bidimensional display. Several works demonstrate that stere-
oscopic visualization may provide a teleoperator with a higher sense
of presence in remote environments because of higher depth percep-
tion [27–32]. This leads to higher comprehension of distance as well as
aspects related to it, e.g., ambient and obstacle layout
The proposed visualization approach has been implemented at the
3D Visualization and Robotics Lab at the University of Hertfordshire,
United Kingdom. It has been tested by teleoperating the 3MORDUC
platform, a wheeled mobile robot located at DIEES (Dipartimento di
Ingegneria Elettrica, Elettronica e dei Sistemi), in University of Cata-
nia, Italy, more than 2500 km far from the operator location.
This thesis is structured as follows. Section 2 introduces some pre-
liminary notions about augmented reality and stereoscopic visualiza-
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