A novel approach
to Internet robotics developed at Berkeley melds five million years
of human evolution with a new approach to audience participation
to form the ultimate real-world avatar. Meet the Tele-Actor, a "human
robot" that debuted at the annual Webby Awards gala held at the
War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco in July.
More agile than a traditional robot, the Tele-Actor is a human
wearing a small audiovisual system and wireless link to the Internet.
The system enables an online audience to see what the Tele-Actor
sees, hear what it hears, and direct it to explore any remote
location - from an exclusive event like the Webby Awards or a
presidential inauguration to an educational site such as a dormant
volcano on an explosive war zone.
"Remote-controlled robots have been used to replace humans in
outer space and undersea, but in this project, a human replaces
the robot," says Berkeley professor Ken Goldberg, who is affiliated
both with the Department of Industrial Engineering and Operations
Research and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer
Sciences.
The audience collaboratively controls the Tele-Actor by clicking
on a browser-based interface to vote on the Tele-Actor's next
action or statement. The most popular request is then radioed
to the Tele-Actor. Meanwhile, feedback from the real world is
transmitted back to the online audience from the sensors integrated
into the Tele-Actor's attire.
On the night of the Webby Awards, nearly fifty users from around
the world participated in the Tele-Actor experiment, which included
the Tele-Actor presenting an award on stage and conducting an
interview with Webby Awards Webcast host Sam Donaldson. After
all, the possibility of a Tele-Actor journalist is not far-fetched,
Goldberg explains.
Each user of the Tele-Actor system is represented by a colored square, called a votel (voting element). To direct the Tele-Actor, the user places his votel somewhere on the image.
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Numerous telerobots have been deployed on the Internet, including
early devices by Goldberg and Berkeley computer science professor
John Canny and Ph.D. candidate Eric Paulos, a founding member of
the Tele-Actor research team. Historically, though, users must queue
up to control most Internet telerobots. The Tele-Actor system demonstrates
the feasibility of multiple, even hundreds, of users simulatenously
controlling a single telepresence device.
"Collaboration is a crucial ingredient for education and teamwork,"
Goldberg says. "For instance, The Tele-Actor could allow groups
of students in a U.S. classroom to collaboratively steer a telerobot
through a working steelmill in Japan."
The "Spatial Dynamic Voting" interface developed by Goldberg
and his students in collaboration with a group at MIT enables
each "Tele-Director" to vote on the Tele-Actor's next action by
placing a colored square called a "votel" (voting element) on
an image that illustrates a question. For example, high school
students participating in an online visit to an archaeological
dig might see a wide-angle shot of the whole site with the question
"Where should we explore next?" Each Tele-Director could then
click their votel on a particular spot in the image while also
seeing the other Tele-Directors' responses. During each one-minute
election cycle, a Tele-Director is free to change his or her vote.
And that's when things start getting interesting, Goldberg says.
Indeed, the human-centered Tele-Actor technology offers insights
into the psychology and sociology of group dynamics.
"We're trying to understand how feedback and time delay affect
consensus, voting patterns, and behavior such as standing ovations,"
he says.
Additional live experiments are planned, including a virtual
visit to a microfabrication facility by a class of seventh graders.
A next-generation Tele-Actor system may employ live video and
audio feeds rather than still images, making the experience even
more immersive, Goldberg says.
The public is invited to sign up for future experiments and
to try out the Spatial Dynamic Voting interface with prestored
images by visiting the Tele-Actor research Web site.
The Tele-Actor: Experiments in Remote Control: teleactor.berkeley.edu
Ken Goldberg's Home Page: www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg
John Canny and Eric Paulos' Personal Roving Presences (PRoPs):
www.prop.org
The Webby Awards: www.webbyawards.com
