Communication capability of telepresence system with the miniature humanoid MH-2

Recently, several different types of telepresence robots have been developed. Their ability to communicate with a person in a remote location has been analyzed to achieve rich communication, including the presence of an operator. These studies focused on human-sized robots, small-sized non-humanoid robots, or small-sized humanoid robots without human-like proportions. A small-sized humanoid robot with human-like proportions has not been studied because of the absence of such a small humanoid. It should be noted that human-like proportions play a very important role in enhancing the presence of an operator through an avatar. In our previous work, a small-sized humanoid robot named MH-2 was developed for wearable telepresence system. The MH-2 consists of seven degrees-of-freedom (7-DOF) arms, a 3-DOF head, and a torso scaled according to human-like proportions. Wire–pulley mechanisms were employed to achieve a compact design to adopt a requirement for wearability. In this work, a telepresence system is introduced for the evaluation of the communication ability of the MH-2. In the experiment, Skype, using a flat display, was compared with the MH-2. The “Indian Poker” game was employed for the experiment. It is an ideal evaluation platform because it is a psychological game that requires careful observations among the players. The evaluations were conducted in terms of six aspects: emotion or personality, line of sight, familiarity, presence, enjoyment, and smoothness of the game progress. The experimental results showed that the MH-2 performed positively in two out of six aspects, namely the line of sight and smoothness of the game progress. On the other hand, facial expressions play important role to display individual presence. From a comprehensive standpoint, the MH-2 demonstrated good capabilities for rich remote communications.