Miniature humanoid MH-1 for wearable telecommunicator

Abstract

In our previous work, a personal telerobot system named “telecommunicator” has been introduced. The telecommunicator achieves communication with a remote person through a teleoperated robot. The telecommunicator can be considered as a wearable telexistence system. Until now, three prototypes of the wearable telecommunicator, T1, T2 and T3, have been developed as research platforms. Through these robots, the operator can communicate with a person in the remote site with realistic sensation. However, it is difficult for the person in the remote site to feel presence of the operator, because of their typical robot appearance. In this paper, to tackle this problem, a wearable miniature humanoid robot MH-1 is introduced as the telecommunicator. MH-1 equips with 4-dof dual arms and a 3-dof head with a stereo camera system. In this paper, its concept, design and a developed prototype model and results of fundamental experiments are described.