Telepresence Mechatronic Robot (TEBoT): Towards the design and control of socially interactive bio-inspired system

Abstract

Socially interactive systems are embodied agents that engage in social interactions with humans. From a design perspective, these systems are built by considering a biologically inspired design (Bio-inspired) that can mimic and simulate human-like communication cues and gestures. The design of a bio-inspired system usually consists of (i) studying biological characteristics, (ii) designing a similar biological robot, and (iii) motion planning, that can mimic the biological counterpart. In this article, we present a design, development, control-strategy and verification of our socially interactive bio-inspired robot, namely - Telepresence Mechatronic Robot (TEBoT). The key contribution of our work is an embodiment of a real human-neck movements by, i) designing a mechatronic platform based on the dynamics of a real human neck and ii) capturing the real head movements through our novel single-camera based vision algorithm. Our socially interactive bio-inspired system is based on an intuitive integration-design strategy that combines computer vision based geometric head pose estimation algorithm, model based design (MBD) approach and real-time motion planning techniques. We have conducted an extensive testing to demonstrate effectiveness and robustness of our proposed system.