Telexistence and R‐Cubed

Telexistence (tele‐existence) is technology which enables a human being to have a real time sensation of being at a remote location, while giving the person the ability to interact with the remote and/or virtual environments. He or she can “telexist” (tele‐exist) in a real environment where the robot exists or in a virtual environment that a computer has generated. It is also possible to telexist in a mixed environment of real and virtual, which is called augmented telexistence. The concept of telexistence, i.e. virtual existence in a remote or computer‐generated environment, has developed into a national R&D scheme called R‐Cubed (Real‐time Remote Robotics). Based on the scheme the National R&D Project of “Humanoid and Human Friendly Robotics”, Humanoid Robotics Project (HRP) in short, was launched in April 1998. This is an effort to integrate telerobotics, network technology and virtual reality into networked telexistence.