Recently updated on November 14th, 2021 at 02:43 am
Imagine if one day, you can do the physical chores such as washing the dishes, sweeping the floor and pickup the parcel from your couch or sofa. Recently, there is a company from France called Pollen Robotics that introduce a solution where the humanoid robot can be controlled remotely via VR technology. It is so cool. They called it as the first humanoid VR Teleoperation application in the market.
How the Humanoid Robot & VR Works?
The humanoid robot from Pollen Robotics is called Reachy. They called it as the open-source robot that can interact with people and also manipulate the objects. For your info, Reachy comes with the Robot Operating System, ROS-2 based software and a more powerful embedded computer. It is also equipped with the high quality dual camera with optical zoom.
With the VR solution, you can “put” yourself in Reachy’s body. By using the VR headset, you can view the remote surrounding through the humanoid’s cameras. And with the VR controllers, you can manipulate Reachy’s arm and hand.
So far, looks like you will be able to pick and place (or drop) the objects with the robot hand. This mean you can control Reachy’s movement from anywhere in the world. With you controlling Reachy’s body, you can remotely operate it and able to perform complex task with it.
With the prepackages AI (Artificial Intelligence), this humanoid robot will also be able to learn from your movement as well. This will help make the future application development much easier. You can watch it here to appreciate the beauty of it…
Looks cool rite? We gotta say that the concept looks similar like a sci-fi movie titled “Surrogates” starring Bruce Willis. The movie is set in the future where people live within their homes and they just let their robotic surrogates (perhaps humanoid) to go outside and roaming around to do their daily chores. Well, seems that the future start to happen now…
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What is the Potential Benefits of It?
Although for now Reachy is built until it waist (or maybe torso) only, but we can see many potential benefits of the humanoid robot in the future. Especially those that we can control remotely via VR technology. For examples:
- To have a more realistic virtual travel. With this, you can use this humanoid to move around at your travel location while you are still in your country.
- The maid or house cleaning service can work from remote without going to your home. Just order their service online, then they can immediately start the work instantly.
- Or maybe you want to experience walking and collecting stones on moon or Mars in real-time.
- Perhaps, you can use it to play sports and games physically from remote such as snooker, chess, bowling, carom etc.
- While you are in the office, maybe you can use it to “move around” in your house to check on your kids, maid or find things that you forgot to bring to office.
The potential seems endless. For more info about this project, you can read it at:
- The Official Pollen Robotics Website.
- “Pollen Robotics’ humanoid robot can be controlled remotely with VR” from TechCrunch.
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