An immersive interface for remote collaboration with multiple telepresence robots through digital twin spaces

摘要

A human-robot collaboration system “Telecobot” is proposed, in which a remote user allocates tasks to multiple telepresence robots via digital twin spaces. The digital twin spaces of local sites where robots work is used as a medium to observe the real spaces from a remote site and to give instructions to the smart robots on the local site. Telecobot supports a remote user understanding the real-time status of local sites distributed geographically and allocating tasks to each of the robots. We assume that the robots are smart enough to execute the series of tasks assigned by the remote user. This division of roles is a major characteristic of Telecobot, where a remote user is responsible for judging the situation and building a series of tasks via the digital twin space, while multiple robots working in each of the local sites executes the individual tasks following the information built by the remote user in the digital twins of the local sites. An experiment assuming telecollaboration with smart robots working at nursing care sites demonstrated the division of roles for the care works and showed the potential of increasing the productivity of the work by using the Telecobot interface.