A unique mobile telepresence testbed has been designed and implemented. This testbed is a tool for research in telepresence and tele-existence for control of remote robotic systems. An eight-degree-of-freedom, redundant manipulator has been designed and implemented for this system. Resolved acceleration control and impedance control have been demonstrated. An omnidirectional base has been built to provide human-like movement capabilities to the telepresence testbed. Control software written for the system allows easy control of the base and the arm. Hand-controllers are used to guide the system trajectories. Ethernet, serial links, or wireless radio modems can be used as the control medium. Use of individual motor control processors for each motor allows high servo update rates to be achieved. A high level, modular and extensible library of routines has been written to allow easy programming of the system by future researchers. A head-tracking platform with color stereo cameras provides video feedback to the operator with depth perception to allow fine manipulation tasks.