As a part of the national applied science & technology five-year project “Humanoid and Human Friendly Robotics,” or “Humanoid Robotics Project (HRP)” in short, which was launched in 1998, we have developed a novel humanoid robot telexistence cockpit for humanoid biped robot to assist and cooperate with people. By introducing telexistence techniques through an advanced type of teleoperated robot system, a human operator can be provided with information regarding the robot’s remote environment in the form of natural audio, visual, and tactile feedback, thus providing the operator with a sense of being present inside the robot itself. He or she can intuitively control the arms and hands of the slave robot through the telexistence master subsystem with force feedback.
In order to evaluate the usability of the cockpit for HRP robots, an experiment was conducted where an operator was given the task to navigate the environment of the robot and manipulate objects by utilizing the humanoid robot as a surrogate. For the purpose of demonstrating the feasibility of using the developed system in the field of service robots, a mockup shopping zone was built in a real environment. A humanoid
robot was set inside the mockup, and a human operator was given the task to control the robot from the telexistence cockpit in the remote site with a sense of presence. The operator navigated the robot as if he or she were inside the robot, and manipulated the robot's arms and hands to handle a stuffed animal, stack blocks, open and close a sliding glass door of a cupboard, pick up a can from inside the cupboard, place the can into a basket, and so forth.
We have successfully conducted a technical demonstration to evaluate the developed cockpit and the robot. This was the first experiment in the world which succeeded in controlling a humanoid biped robot by using telexistence.
