Immersion type virtual environment for human-robot interaction

With the development of information science and robotic technology, it becomes more important to generate human interactive robots. The design platform for developing such robots should satisfy three basic conditions: (1) it can test safely the performance of the robot through the physical interaction with human, (2) human subject can estimate subjectively the outside appearance of the robot, and (3) it can simulate the dynamic human interactive robot motion within real-time. This paper proposes our immersion type dynamic simulation platform. An application to estimate the robots performance when performing cooperative object lifting task with human subject is chosen in order to show the effectiveness of our system. The analysis of the recorded data is useful to design the novel human interactive robots.