Development of visual user interface cockpit for humanoid robot control

摘要

MITI, Ministry of International Trade and Industry in Japan established the national 5-year-project of HRP, Humanoid Robotics Project, in 1998. The tele-existence technology is applied to the humanoid robotics system since a human operator in a cockpit remotely controls a humanoid robot as if he feels located at a robot site. This paper describes the development of a visual user interface embedded in a tele-existence cockpit controlling a humanoid robot. The visual user interface is composed of a novel surrounded visual display and a HMD system with a head-tracking function. On the surrounded visual display, real images captured by a newly developed multi-camera system for a wide field of view mounted on the robot are presented. This allows the operator to get a feeling of locomotion as if he is on the robot. The HMD system with the head-tracking function enables the operator to easily control the manipulation of the robot hands. To support the complex operation of the operator in the cockpit, a virtual environment is supplemented on the real images captured by the robot cameras in the developed visual user interface.