iCub3 Avatar System: Enabling Remote Fully-Immersive Embodiment of Humanoid Robots

Understand

We present an avatar system designed to facilitate the embodiment of humanoid robots by human operators, validated through iCub3, a humanoid developed at the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT).

• More precisely, the contribution of the paper is twofold: first, we present the humanoid iCub3 as a robotic avatar which integrates the latest significant improvements after about fifteen years of development of the iCub series; second, we present a versatile avatar system enabling humans to embody humanoid robots encompassing aspects such as locomotion, manipulation, voice, and face expressions with comprehensive sensory feedback including visual, auditory, haptic, weight, and touch modalities.
• We validate the system by implementing several avatar architecture instances, each tailored to specific requirements.
• First, we evaluated the optimized architecture for verbal, non-verbal, and physical interactions with a remote recipient.