“Telenoid™ R1,” A portable teleoperated android robot

Telenoid R1 is the 1st-generation Telenoid that is refined based on the observation in field studies.

TELENOID

Osaka University and Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute International (ATR) have collaboratively developed a new portable teleoperated android robot, “Telenoid™ R1,” that can effectively transfer peoples’ presence.

Teleoperated android robots in the past, such as Geminoid™ HI-1 (developed by ATR) and Geminoid™ F (developed by Osaka Univ. and ATR) owned appearances similar to actual persons, and were intended to transfer presences of actual persons.

The new Telenoid™ R1 was designed to appear and to behave as a minimalistic human; at the very first glance, one can easily recognize the Telenoid™ as a human while the Telenoid™ appear as both male and female, as both old and young.

By this minimal design, the Telenoid™ allows people to feel as if an acquaintance in the distance is next to you. Moreover, Telenoid™’s soft and pleasant skin texture and small, child-like body size allows one to enjoy hugging and communicating with it easily.

The term Telenoid™ is a new term coined from a prefix Tele-, as Telephone and Teleoperation, and the Latin postfix -oideswhich indicates similarity, as Humanoid. Using Telenoid™s, we will investigate the essential elements for representing and transferring humanlike presence. In practical usage, we expect Telenoid™ to be used as a new communication media.

Design specs

• A novel minimalistic design that can effectively represent human presence

• Soft and pleasant body

• Low cost due to decreased numbers of actuators (Telenoid™ R1:9、Geminoid™ HI-1:50、Geminoid™ F:12)

• Small-size body and simple internal structure by use of electric (DC) motors

• Easy teleoperation based on the teleoperation technology developed by ATR

Development of Telenoid was partially supported by Grant-in Aid for Scientific Research (S), KAKENHI (20220002) [Principal Investigator: Hiroshi Ishiguro (Professor of Osaka University, ATR fellow) and JST CREST (Core Research of Evolutional Science & Technology) research promotion program.

Hiroshi and his team stripped away differentiators, like age and gender to make this droid universal, then dispatched several of them to nursing homes as companions.

Introduced in 2010, was the generation 1 or R1; currently we would only be finding the R4 generation of TELENOIDs.