Asked By
hannahwtc
10 points
N/A
Posted on - 06/08/2012
Miniature humanoid hence MH-2 Robot is out. This robot lets you share your experience with someone else. I wonder how it works.
“Miniature Humanoid” Telepresence, how Does it work?
MH-2 is a wearable miniature humanoid telepresence robot that can be a substitute for the presence of your friend by acting as an avatar for a remote operator (your friend).The robot can be inhabited by your friends during any given time from any part of the world. Basically, it works when your friend puts on a 360-degree immersive display, then stands in front of some motion capture environment. The robot then imitates and duplicates the actions, gestures and speech of your friend back home; by means of this your friend gets to see what the robot sees. The robot mimics the action of your friend accurately and realistically as possible with its features that includes: 7 DOF (degree of freedom) of the arms, 3 DOF for the head, 2 DOF body and one additional DOF for imitating realistic breathing.
“Miniature Humanoid” Telepresence, how Does it work?
The MH-2 is a tiny wearable telepresence humanoid robot that can imitate every movement created by your friend who is located somewhere else. The idea behind this tiny humanoid robot was envisioned by researchers at the Yamagata University in Japan. The humanoid robot is designed to actually imitate human behavior precisely enough for you to feel as if your friend is really there with you.
Carrying the tiny humanoid robot is not easy. Besides the fact that the tiny robot is resting on your shoulder, its servomotors should be carried in your backpack. It is not a production prototype but a brave experiment in human-robot relations. See image.
In reality, your friend is really at home doing different gestures in front of a motion capture setup and at the same time watching the video captured in real-time by the robot. While your friend is busy doing different things, the tiny humanoid robot is also busy copying all the movements of your friend.
The expressive abilities of the robot are remarkable. Its arms are set to 7 degrees of freedom or DoF, the head is set to 3 DoF, and the body has 2 DoF and an additional of 1 which is committed to imitating the breathing movements.
