Humanoid robot tele-operated from home page aimed for elementary school science education

A humanoid robot which is tele-operated from an Internet home page is proposed in this paper. The purpose of the robot system is to encourage elementary school children who live in the countryside or have handicaps to study Science. The proposed robot system will provide them with an opportunity to operate a real robot system from their house or hospital. The tele-operation is so easy that a user just clicks control buttons while watching the shape of the robot system on a personal computer display. A mobile robot system with two arms has been fabricated. The concepts of the robot system, the mechanical system design, the control system design, and the tele-operation system using the Internet are presented. The operational experiments by elementary school children are also presented in order to evaluate the robot system.