Telecommunicator: a novel robot system for human communications

In this paper, a novel personal telerobotic system named "telecommunicator" is introduced. It has a movable head with a video camera and a simple arm. Both the head and the arm can be telecontrolled from the local site through the Internet, using a wireless communication link just as for mobile cellular phones. As a result, the person on the local site can communicate with people around the telecommunicator on the remote site. The telecommunicator can be made small and compact, since it is not expected to achieve any physical task but only communication. Two different forms of the telecommunicator are proposed; a wearable one and a mobile one. Furthermore, to achieve good performance of the telecommunicator, a new concept called "extended shared control" is introduced. In addition, to confirm its application capacity, two prototypes of the wearable telecommunicator, T1 and T2, have been developed as research platforms.