A system that allows users to communicate with other people remotely by embodying a humanoid robot

Recent technological advances are opening up new and exciting possibilities for communicating with other people and visiting places remotely. These advances include telepresence robots, moving robotic systems that allow users to virtually navigate remote environments and interact with humans in those environments.

Researchers from Hanyang University and Dooksung Women’s University in South Korea recently developed a promising telepresence system based on a humanoid robot, a head-mounted display, motion transporters, voice transporters and a vision transport system.

This system is presented in an article published in International Journal of Social Roboticsallows users to fully possess the body of a humanoid robot, thereby accessing remote environments and interacting with both people and objects in those environments as if they were physically there.

“The current study aims to develop a beam transmission system that provides full body ownership by a humanoid robot and explore the telecommunication experience of users as visitors and locals with different levels of control.” – Myungul Jeon, Jejun Kim, Kyungsik Han, and Kwangguk (Kenny ) Kim wrote in his newspaper.

The main goal of recent work by Jung and his colleagues was to develop a telepresence system that would allow human users to fully embody a humanoid robot in remote location, using their body to navigate their environment and interact with others in it. To evaluate their system, the researchers conducted a series of experiments in which users were asked to either directly use their system, assuming the role of “visitors,” or interact with a robot controlled by another user, assuming the role of “locals.”

“Forty participants were assigned both visitor and local roles, and their co-presence, usability, eye contact, emotion, verbal and gestural communication were examined,” Jung, Kim, Han and Kim wrote in their paper.

In the researchers’ experiment, participants interacted with each other in pairs, where one controlled a humanoid robot and the other interacted with it. The pairs underwent three trials. In the first, the robot was static and users could not move it at all, in the second, it could only turn its head and its movements were synchronized with the movements of the users, and in the third, its entire body could move mirroring the movements of the user.

“Results showed that visitors’ subjective reports of telecommunications capabilities generally moderated step-by-step by the level of embodied control, while local residents did not,” Jung, Kim, Han, and Kim write in their paper. . “However, the participants’ emotional, verbal and gestural communication showed trends of synchronization between the visitor and the local resident.”

The findings gathered by this group of researchers highlight the potential value of telepresence systems that allow users to embody a humanoid robot. In their tests, Jung and his colleagues found when users had more control over a a humanoid robotThe body and the robot reflected their movements, their eye contact, emotional, verbal and gestural communication style more closely matched the style of the people they interacted with.

In the future, the system proposed by the team of researchers can be used to improve telepresence applications that involve remote interaction of the user with other people. In addition, it can inspire the creation of similar systems based on it humanoid robots.

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