Patent ID: 6958746

Claim:
A telepresence system for allowing an operator to interact with a remote operating environment, the system comprising: one or more input devices, the one or more input devices configured to produce raw data representative of operator commands; an input conversion module configured to convert the raw data into a zone structure representative of the operator commands in a telepresence-device independent format, the zone structure being a format independent of any one of the one or more input devices; one or more device modules corresponding to one or more telepresence devices, the one or more device modules configured to convert the zone structure into telepresence device commands specific to an associated one of the one or more telepresence devices, the zone structure being a format independent of any of the one or more telepresence devices, the telepresence device commands resulting from at least a portion of the operator commands; and a configuration module configured to associate a specific one of the one or more input devices corresponding to the zone structure with a specific one of the one or more telepresence devices which responds to the telepresence device commands resulting from the zone structure.