Design and Development of a Teleoperation System for Affective Tabletop Robot Haru

The experimental tabletop robot Haru, used for affective telepresence research, enables a teleoperator to communicate a variety of information to a remote user through the robotic medium from a distance. However, the robot’s rich communicative modality poses some problems to the teleoperator. Based on their experience of controlling the robot, teleoperators feel the need to be constantly attentive to and engaged with the stream of data from the remote user in order to achieve a seamless and affective interaction. Consequently, teleoperators report feeling fatigued, resulting in a decrease in time using the teleoperation system. In addition, the bulk of the data stream containing information about the remote user poses data privacy concerns. In this paper, we describe the design and development of an improved affective teleoperation system that focuses on privacy, controllability, and mental fatigue. The proposed system enables a teleoperator to maintain the same degree of robot control with a minimal amount of data from the remote user. Moreover, our studies show that the proposed system drastically reduces teleoperation fatigue as shown by the increase in time the system is in use.