Development of a mobile robot which embodies a remote instructor

A system which supports remote instruction for physical tasks in the real world should support following requirements: 1) flexibility of the body arrangement; 2) awareness of each other´s orientations; and 3) communication of gestural information. To satisfy these requirements, we developed a system named “GestureMan”. GestureMan is a mobile robot mounted with three cameras and a remotely controlled laser pointer on it. An instructor controls the robot remotely with a joystick and gives instruction to an operator. Two preliminary experiments using a low-speed Satellite link and high-speed ATM network respectively show that GestureMan has an ability to support the remote instruction. Furthermore, gigabit network enabled the natural interaction between the instructor and the operator by alleviating limitations such as time delay and narrow field of view