ABSTRACT
Telexistence (tel-existence) is fundamentally an advanced type of telerobotics system that enables an operator at the control to perform remote tasks dexterously with the feeling that he or she exists in a surrogate robot that is working in the remote environment. It is also a concept named for the technology which enables a human being to have a real time sensation of being at the place other than the place where he or she actually exists, and is able to interact with the remote and/or virtual environment. It enables a human operator to have a sensation of being in a remote real environment where a surrogate robot exists, while being augmented by a virtual environment synthesized by a computer, whose structure is based on the sensor information on board the robot. The concept of telexistence, i.e., virtual existence in a remote or computer-generated environment, has developed into a national R&D scheme of R-Cubed (Real-time Remote Robotics) for the advanced and comfortable life of the 21st century network society. R-Cubed can be said to be the effort toward the networked telexistence. Based on the scheme of R-Cubed, in the fiscal year of 1998, Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI) of Japan launched a national five-year project called the Humanoid Robotics Project (HRP). This is an effort to integrate telerobotics, network technology and virtual reality into networked telexistence. This paper reviews how telexistence technology has been developed, and describes a newly developed telexistence cockpit for humanoid robot control, and shows a technical demonstration to evaluate the developed cockpit and the robot. A human operator controls the robot within the remote cockpit as if (s)he were inside the robot itself.
