A new type of telepresence robot Fusion/full Body surrogacy for collaborative communication

Recently, robotics experts from Keio University in Japan have developed a new Fusion of telepresence robots that allow operators to remotely control other people's bodies to help them complete their operations. fusion"dwelling" on the back of the agent, with stereo vision and two-channel hearing, you can control the robot arm and manipulator guidance Agent action, but also can change the direction of the agent. This system has the direction, the compulsion and the inducement, at present the related thesis has been shown on SIGGRAPH emerging Technologies 2018.

The telepresence robot can view distant locations through a robot with a camera. It has a wide range of practical applications, such as in military and space research. Most of the telepresence robots (telepresence) on the market are attractive because they can provide a mobile-agent-like function that takes you on a remote walk. As long as you think such robots can do great things, such as remote control, looking for elephants in zoos, but they are not so powerful in all cases, for example, you want to help others in collaborative tasks that require physical interaction. Cooperation, especially instructions, usually depends on the body movement of one person to another to show how to do something, even if the telepresence robot has one or two arms, it may not be able to interact effectively with the remote user directly.

The robot specialist at Keio University in Japan has developed a new telepresence robot that allows users to remotely control other people's bodies to help them do their job. (A similar idea is tele-actor, conceived by robotics experts, artist Ken Goldberg and his colleagues at UC Berkeley.) The researchers at Keio University called Fusion the system they created, "dwelling" on the human back, and the user could use their second pair of arms (the robotic arm of the robot) to show how to accomplish the task, and even to move the "inhabited" arm directly.

"fusion" the body agent by sharing the same perspective for two people: one is the agent (surrogate), and the other is the operator (operator), which uses two robotic arms mounted on the body of the agent to extend the movement distance and movement of the operator's arm. These arms can be used independently of the operator's arm in a co-operative scenario, or can be connected to the agent's arm to directly assist and support the agent's actions. The operator uses an off-the-shelf helmet display (Oculus CV1) to connect himself and the agent's body. The three-axis robot on the back of the agent has stereo vision and two-channel hearing, and it has two humanoid robotic arms (6 degrees of freedom) and a movable hand.

Agent Front display

Typically, in such contexts, "proxies" refer to fully independent robots controlled by humans, such as the MIT HERMES project, where remote humans use VR to see the scene through the robot's eyes while controlling the robot's limbs by moving their own arms. Fusion operates in a similar way, but the difference is that it "inhabits" on the human back, and it runs with varying degrees of intrusion:

• Directional (Directed): The manipulator can help or command the direction of the agent's action.
• Mandatory (Enforced): The remote user can connect the robot arm with the agent's hand, thus directly controlling the agent's limb movements.
• Inducement (induced): The remote user is forced to instruct the agent to move direction by dragging and dropping the agent.

One of the great advantages of Fusion is that the operator can share the same perspective with the agent, which makes it easier to give feedback in a physical task. The best scene is like a friend around you who gently helps you do your best. The worst scenario is standing behind a friend, forcing you to hit your face and asking why you're hitting yourself. In either case, I'm sure it will be a unique learning experience.

Paper: Fusion:full Body surrogacy for collaborative communication

Paper Link: https://dl.acm.org/authorize.cfm?key=N666698

Absrtact: Effective communication is a key factor in a social and professional environment that includes sharing skills and actions with multiple people. This study proposes a new system Fusion that allows a person to "sneak into" another person's body by remotely manipulating the wearable system to share the entire body. "fusion" implements the body agent by sharing the same perspective of two individuals (agents and operators), using two robotic arms mounted on the body of the agent to extend the moving distance and movement of the operator's arm. The robotic arm can be used independently of the agent's arm in a co-operative scenario, or it can be connected to the agent's arm and directly remotely assist and support the agent's actions. We use Fusion to achieve three levels of body-driven communication (bodily driven communication): Direct, Mandatory (Enforced), and inductive (induced). Through this system, we demonstrate the possibility of truly moving one's body movements to another to achieve true physical communication.

Original link: https://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/humanoids/ Fusion-a-collaborative-robotic-telepresence-parasite-that-lives-on-your-back

A new type of telepresence robot Fusion/full Body surrogacy for collaborative communication