Share Your Body with Telepresence Robot

Ever wished you could be in two places at once? Now you can share your body with a telepresence robot created by Dzmitry Tsetserukou of Toyohashi University of Technology in Japan and his team while receiving information about its body to experience another location remotely. "It's like body-to-body telepresence," says Tsetserukou.

By wearing a special belt and using your body like a joystick, the robot can be steered from a distance. Flexible sensors in the belt detect the direction and angle of your movement, allowing the robot to zip forward if you lean forward heavily.

At the same time, the belt can give you a sense of the robot's environment. An on-board laser scanner detects obstacles outside the robot's field of view and conveys their direction by activating vibrating sensors in your belt. For example, when the robot faces a table, the front sensors start to buzz.

Special glasses also allow you to share the robot's view by receiving stereoscopic images from cameras in its eyes.

According to Tsetserukou, existing telepresence robots only allow you to experience what a robot sees and don't tap into the other senses. The team plans to develop their robot to make teleconferencing more immersive and to allow people to play sports remotely.

The robot will be presented at Siggraph Asia, a yearly conference on computer graphics and interactive techniques, from December 13-15 in Hong Kong.

HyQ - IIT's Hydraulic Quadruped Robot - YouTube

This video shows HyQ in some serious action.

It's not quite an invasion, but in recent years we've seen a small parade of quadruped robots strutting out of labs around the world.

In the United States, Boston Dynamics has introduced its now-famous BigDog and, more recently, a bigger bot named AlphaDog.

Early this year, we wrote about FROG, a prototype built in China, and just a few weeks ago we described the SQ1 robot, a South Korean project.

Now it's time to unveil the latest addition to this pack: HyQ is a robot developed at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), in Genoa.

The machine, built by a team led by Professor Darwin Caldwell, is a hydraulic quadruped (Hence, hy-q) designed to perform highly dynamic tasks such as running and jumping.

Legged locomotion remains one of the biggest challenges in robotics, and the Italian team hopes that their robot can become a platform for research and collaboration among different groups a kind of open source BigDog.

Technics
HyQ's trunk is made of stainless steel and a folded, 3mm thick sheet of aluminum alloy. The 1 m (3.28 feet) long, 50 cm (1.64 feet) wide and 98 cm (3.21 feet) tall robot weighs 90 kg with the hydraulic power supply on board, and 70 kg with external hydraulics.

Hydraulic actuation offers high power density, high torque output and velocity. It also allows for high bandwidth torque control.

The downside is that the components are still rather bulky and not very energy efficient, but that is something the researchers at IIT's Department of Advanced Robotics intend to change.

They also want to make HyQ power-autonomous, endow it with a head with a built in stereo camera and a laser range finder and give it an arm with a gripper.

Worms in Space to Study Microgravity

A still from a video filmed at the mission
landing site which shows worm movement

A transparent roundworm could reveal the biological effects of microgravity and space radiation, and perhaps provide clues on how to protect future human astronauts headed for the moon, Mars and beyond.

The C. elegans worm's biological responses proved eerily similar to those of humans during a series of experiments aboard the International Space Station in 2004. Now researchers have published a review of their findings in the journal Advances in Space Research.