Wearable Computing based on Multimodal Communication for Effective Teleoperation with Humanoids

This paper presents a new type of wearable teleoperation system that is applicable to a humanoid robot control. The proposed wearable teleoperation system consists of a self-contained computing hardware with a stereo HMD, a microphone, a headphone and a wireless LAN, an arm and head motion tracking mechanism using several types of sensors to get the motion data of an operator, and simple force reflection mechanism using vibration motors at proper joints. To achieve successful remote tasks, we adopt a new method that utilizes an intelligent self sensory feedback and autonomous behaviors such as automatic grasping and obstacle avoidance in a slave robot side, and the information feedback to an operator through the multimodal communication channel. Through this teleoperation system, we successfully demonstrated several teleoperation tasks including an object manipulation, a mobile platform control of the humanoid robot.