Nowadays, personal communication devices such as mobile phones are very popular all over the world. The success of mobile phones lies in the fact that interpersonal communication is vital to the well-being of humans and the mobile phones help people achieving this goal by extending the sense of hearing and power of speech to far away places conveniently. However, apart from the auditory sense, humans also possess other senses for communication and interaction, such as vision, touching and body motion. These sensations play very important roles in our everyday interpersonal communication, and in terms of technology, the state-of-the-art in telecommunication protocol and computer networks has already allowed various forms of data to be transmitted efficiently. So why we still cannot find multi-modal sensation communication a commonplace among the mobile devices? We believe that the lack of efficient human-machine interfaces is where the bottleneck is situated. Therefore, we propose to build a new type of mobile communication device which possesses perceptual powers, capable of performing actuated motions and can support intelligent interactions. We call this novel class of devices wearable robots.
We are developing the methodologies for developing and supporting distributed, wearable robot systems which can be used as mobile devices for communication and interaction. The research provides a framework for constructing distributed robot infrastructure in which each robot is a portable communication interface through which remote interactions between humans, robots and machines in the networked environment can be achieved. We will address the following issues: (1) how to design the wearable robots which are small, lightweight, portable, modular and human friendly, (2) how to develop a distributed robot architecture which can efficiently support the communication and control between the robots, humans and other machines in the networked environment, (3) how to capture the information of the wearable robot users and interpret their intention, and (4) how to incorporate contextual information processing in the wearable robot architecture.
This work has the potential for applications in different areas in our everyday life. As an illustration of the possibilities spawned by the wearable robots, let's consider a scenario where a wearable robot user is traveling in a train through the suburban areas and cannot get into the stadium for a soccer match of his favorite team. Using his wearable robot, he can subscribe to the interactive telepresence service provided by the stadium. Live video will be transmitted to the display on the robot, and the user can choose to view from various adjustable positions and camera angles from different vision systems located around the stadium. More to that, when user's favorite team scores a goal, the robot may join him in his celebration by doing some singing and dancing performance. Upon the completion of the wearable robot project, we will deliver the wearable robots capable of intelligent interaction and communication, the software architecture supporting the services of the wearable robot system. The novel technologies acquired here will be valuable in opening lines of potential products in electronics, communication, telemedicine and multimedia industries.
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