At ICRA 2009, the Rollin' Justin humanoid robot (the lovable robot that "Danced Like in Pulp Fiction") demonstrated some impressive teleoperation capabilities. The man-machine interface (MMI) consists of two components. The first component comprises two DLR-III lightweight arms, the same type employed by the robot, terminated with force-torque sensing load cells to command the omnidirectional base or the arms / hands. Meanwhile, the second component, a fully-immersive heads-up display with vicon (optical) head tracking, constantly streams robot-mounted camera images to the heads-up display while simultaneously panning and tilting the robot's head in concert with the user's head movements. All-in-all, this is a very impressively engineered system. Be sure to check out the pictures and video below.
The video below comes from the ICRA 2009 video session, entitled "Multimodal Telepresent Control of DLR Rollin' JUSTIN".
{youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89KSivOG5Y4&feature=player_embedded}
(Theo: hizook.com)
