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Taylor Veltrop used a Kinect to read his arm movements which were then carried out by a robot. The robot was programmed using Willow Garage's open-source robot operating system (ROS). As Kit Eaton suggest, this quick experiment provides an illustration of the path towards robotic avatars.

This video from PAL Robotics shows the teleoperation system of its REEM robot. Equipped with a Kinect sensor as a motion capture device, a laptop captures the gestures and movements of a person and feeds the result to the robot as commands. This process is called motion retargeting and the teleoperation system was developed by Marcus Liebhardt as part of his master thesis project. PAL Robotics is a small Spanish company based in Barcelona, part of the PAL Group from Abu Dhabi. It develops humanoid robots since 2004 and its latest version of the REEM line of robots focuses towards commercial applications.

With all of the new competition in the consumer robotics field, it’s about time for iRobot to show that they’re still capable of innovating new and exciting things. AVA, their technology demonstrator, definitely fits into the new and exciting category. AVA is short for ‘Avatar,’ although iRobot was careful not to call it a telepresence robot so as not to restrict perceptions of what it’s capable of. AVA is capable of fully autonomous navigation, relying on a Kinect-style depth sensing camera, laser rangefinders, inertial movement sensors, ultrasonic sensors, and (as a last resort) bump sensors. We got a run-down a few days ago at CES, check it out: