Roboy Finals WS2021 - Full-body Force-Feedback and TeleportVR
Raphael, a Roboy/Devanthro team member, introduces the telepresence program at the Munich Robotic Enthusiasts Meetup before two student teams present their work on Roboy and ExoForce.
In this talk
- 7:01
Roboy’s telepresence vision
Raphael describes Roboy’s goal of building humanlike musculoskeletal robots and explains how the project shifted toward telepresence. Operators see and hear through Roboy and control its movements remotely. The team is competing in the ANA Avatar XPRIZE, which offers a $10 million prize purse.
- 15:17
Construct and the operator interface
The Construct team built a VR interface with connection and body status indicators, controls for selecting active body parts, and an emotion display. Its training scene lets operators practice head, arm, hand, and wheelchair control in simulation before entering the real robot. The app uses Unity and can connect to different VR headsets.
- 48:06
ExoForce force control
The ExoForce team added load cells to measure cable tension and PID controllers to regulate forces applied through tendons attached to the operator’s hands. In testing, force error stayed below one newton nearly 90% of the time, and operators distinguished three weights in seven out of ten trials. The team also improved cable retention and replaced wrist attachments to reduce setup time.
- 34:00
Live demonstrations and remaining challenges
In the first demo, an operator uses Roboy to interact with people and objects, though the robot’s hands do not yet provide force feedback. In the ExoForce demo, a simulation sends wall and object collisions to the cage, where the operator feels resistance. The team reports motor oscillations, occasional app crashes, and limits on which force directions the tendons can reproduce.
- 1:23:48
Longer-term research questions
Raphael discusses scaling forces to avoid transmitting dangerous impacts in full, while preserving a sense of contact. He identifies latency, richer sensory streams, and especially full-body haptics as open challenges. He also argues that telepresence can enable useful robotic work while autonomy for complex, unpredictable interactions remains difficult.
Briefs summarise talks and interviews; timestamps open the video at that moment. Claims in a talk are the speaker's own.