Locomotion and Telepresence in Virtual and Real Worlds

Abstract

We present a system in which a human master commands in a natural way the locomotion of a humanoid slave agent in a virtual or real world. The system combines a sensorized passive locomotion platform (Cyberith Virtualizer) for the walking human, the V-REP simulation environment, an Aldebaran Nao humanoid robot with on-board vision, and a HMD (Oculus Rift) for visual feedback of the virtual or real scene. Through this bidirectional human-robot communication, the human achieves a telepresence that may be useful in different application domains. Experimental results are presented to illustrate the quality and limits of the achieved immersive experience for the user.

Telexistence and Teleoperation for Walking Humanoid Robots

“…Simplified Model Control Layer Using the simplified models as in (5), it can be easily shown that the CoM asymptotically converges to a constant DCM, while the DCM, (see Eq. ( 6)) has an unstable first-order dynamics.…”

“…The architecture for human motions retargeting and humanoids teleoperation that we detail in this paper in an illustrative manner, is inspired by the work of A. Spada et al [5]. We address the basic theoretical aspects as well as treating implementation related issues utilizing the iCub humanoid robot platform [6] [7], which uses YARP [8] as middleware for communications, as our test bench to perform given manipulation tasks and walking.…”

“…It is also of note that a similar set-up pertaining to the locomotion aspect was suggested recently, to the best of the author's knowledge, only in [5], however, in the aforementioned work, manipulation tasks and complex end-effector motions retargeting were not included, and were instead recommended as possible extension. Furthermore, our set-up allows analysing the full immersion of the user in terms of telexistence via teleoperation as mentioned above.…”

A Teleoperation Interface for Loco-Manipulation Control of Mobile Collaborative Robotic Assistant

“…In fact, most of the current mobility based teleoperation interfaces (e.g. [15], 2377-3766 © 2019 IEEE. Personal use is permitted, but republication/redistribution requires IEEE permission.…”