An acoustical tele-presence robot: TeleHead II

Abstract

An acoustical tele-presence robot that transfers the sound environment at a remote place should have a human-like head whose movement is synchronized with the listener's head movement. To realize the concept, we built TeleHead I and II. TeleHead I, the prototype, has a molded dummy head and follows the user's head movement. Recently, we built TeleHead II, which is an advanced version of TeleHead I. TeleHead II can synchronize at 120 Hz with only 40 dB SPL drive noise. The size difference between the dummy head and its model is 4 mm in head breadth, which is smaller than 3%. Motion is followed with a 120-ms delay. The total performance of TeleHead II was measured in sound localization experiments. The results show that the listener who is the model for the TeleHead II's dummy head can localize when TeleHead II is stationary or synchronized, but that the localization is more precise in the synchronized situation. They also show that a listener who is not a model can localize in the horizontal plane in the synchronized situation. These results indicate that a human-like dummy head and synchronization with the listener's head movement are effective for realizing an acoustical tele-presence robot.