Wearable robot to be eyes and ears for overprotective parents

If weird technology intrigues you this piece of news sure will. The Yamagata University in Japan has been developing this robot, known as Miniature Humanoid or MH-2, that you can wear on your shoulder, while your friend back home puts on a 360-degree immersive 3D display and stands in front of some sort of motion capture environment (like a Kinect) and sees everything that the robot on your shoulder views. On the other hand, the robot is an avatar of your friend and duplicates your friend’s speech and gestures, and talks to you as if your friend is speaking, IEEE reveals in the Automation blog.   

Sits on your shoulder and is an avatar of  your friend back home...

This robot can be used by parents who want to be with their kids all the time, allowing them to remotely monitor their child’s actions. Basically, it provides real time interaction between the wearer and the person remotely monitoring it. The wearable robot can be used to share the experience that a friend or relative is likely to miss. 

Obviously, it is creepy and weird to carry a robot on your shoulder all the time, and we are sure your child may also not comply with the idea. The wearable MH-2 has two 7-DOF (Degree of Freedom) arms, a 3-DOF head and 2-DOF body, along with one additional DOF for realistic breathing. Yes, the robot can breathe, maybe just to add that human touch to it.  

To pull up those gestures and speech effectively and quickly, MH-2 comes with a backpack full of servos and wires to manage all the complications. So, obviously, you wouldn’t want to carry a huge backup everywhere. Researchers are trying to reduce this bulk which is needed to carry the robot.