Telerobotics is the area of robotics that is concerned with the control of robots from a distance, chiefly using wireless connections ( like WiFi and similar). It is a combination of two major subfields, teleoperation and telepresence.
Teleoperation
Teleoperation means "doing work at a distance", although by "work" we mean almost anything. What we mean by "distance" is also vague: it can refer to a physical distance, where the operator is separated from the robot by a large distance, but it can also refer to a change in scale, where for a example a surgeon may use micro-manipulator technology to conduct surgery on a microscopic level.
Telepresence means "feeling like you are somewhere else". Some people have a very technical interpretation of this, where they insist that you must have head-mounted displays in order to have telepresence. Other people have a task-specific meaning, where "presence" requires feeling that you are emotionally and socially connected with the remote world. It's all a little vague at this time.
Telerobotics allows human users to maniupulate and interact with remote environments but struggles to provide truely realistic force feedback to the user, especially across substantial time delays.
This implies consideration of what humans are sensitive to or not and represents a departure from the traditional approach of improving feel through simply increasing the closed loop bandwidth of a telerobot.
This work is widely applicable but currently focuses on time delayed telerobotics because of the severe limitation on closed loop bandwidth imposed by large communication delays.
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