Have you ever wanted to visit a city you’ve never been to without hopping on a plane to that desired destination? Feel the soft sand on a beach in Barcelona, or roam amid the iconic structures in Rome? This is the primary goal of the new iCub robot advanced telexistence system, also called the iCub3 avatar system, developed by researchers at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Genova, Italy.
IIT first tested the new system in a demonstration in November 2021, where the robot was at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition’s Italian Pavilion, while the operator was 300km away at an IIT lab in the city of Genova. A standard fibre-optic connection was used to link the two.
The operator used a suite of wearable devices, known as the iFeel system. These gadgets include multiple IMUs (inertial measurement units) placed at various locations on a body suit: ‘gloves’ that both track the user’s finger movements and relay tactile sensations from the...