Telexistence cockpit for humanoid robot control

In the fiscal year of 1998, The Ministry of Economy Trade and Industry (METI) of Japan launched a national 5-year project called the Humanoid Robotics Project. As a part of this project, we are developing a novel humanoid robot telexistence (tel-existence) system to assist and cooperate with people. This paper describes a newly developed telexistence cockpit for humanoid robot control, and shows a technical demonstration to evaluate the developed cockpit and the robot. A human operator controls the robot within the remote cockpit as if he or she were inside the robot itself. The telexistence cockpit consists of three subsystems: a three-dimensional (3D) audio/visual display subsystem, a telexistence master subsystem, and a communication subsystem between the cockpit and the robot. A series of real images are captured by cameras mounted on the robot and presented on the visual display, and the human operator in the cockpit observes them with a sensation of real-time presence. He or she can intuitively control the arms and hands of the slave robot through the telexistence master subsystem with force feedback.