Robot Avatar: A Virtual Tourism Robot for People with Disabilities

Abstract

Developing a robot avatar for disabled individuals can help them to reduce the difficulties in their daily lives. In this project, we propose to build a robot that takes pictures or videos from a faraway place and feeds the data to the user in real time. The user may be wearing a Head Mount Device HMD to view the video sent from the robot to enjoy the virtual presence experience. We also propose to design a hand gesture recognition system that the user can use very simple gestures to control the motion of the robot to select his/her favorite views. Currently the robot and finger gesture recognition system have been built and tested successfully. Data analysis of the video latency from the robot to the user has also been carried out. The result will be used to guide us to improve the system for further development. In the next step, we will continue to develop the system including adding the HMD to our system and solve the networking problem to reduce latency. It is hoped that disabled people can enjoy more freedom with the help of the ever advancing computer technologies. Moreover, the same idea has also great potential in.