Feelium: A Touchable Blimp Body for Aerial Telepresence

Effective communication of robot touch intent is essential for safe and predictable physical human-robot interaction. While intent communication has been widely studied, existing approaches lack the spatial specificity and semantic depth necessary to efficiently convey robot touch intent. We present Mirror Skin, a cephalopod inspired concept that mirrors in-situ visual representations of a human's body parts onto the corresponding robot's touch region to communicate who shall initiate touch, where it will occur, and when it is imminent. We informed the design of Mirror Skin through a structured design exploration with experts and demonstrate the real-world feasibility of Mirror Skin with a proof-of-concept prototype. User studies in VR and with the physical prototype showed that Mirror Skin significantly improves accuracy and response times for interpreting touch intent and improves the user experience during physical human-robot interactions.

Remote communication technologies have become widely used; however, supporting a sense of shared physical space and conveying rich non-verbal cues remain challenging in many social interaction scenarios. This study presents "Yui," a full-body cybernetic android avatar designed to integrate operator-side immersive teleoperation with interlocutor-side human-like social signaling. Yui combines a 55-degrees of freedom full-body mechanism with a previously developed android head, facial expression and gaze control, upper-body and arm motion, hand actuation, and a mobile platform. It can be operated through either the immersive mode using a head mounted display-based interface or desktop mode using a webcam-based interface. We evaluated the system through three real-world deployments: a long-term public exhibition at Expo 2025 in Osaka, Kansai, Japan; a remote educational exchange between elementary school students; and a public interaction study with general participants. During the Expo deployment, two units accumulated approximately 1131 h of operation, demonstrating both operational feasibility and maintenance challenges. In the public study, both operators and interlocutors reported positive impressions of co-presence and willingness to use the system. Interlocutors also rated the avatar positively in terms of human likeness and the transmission of emotions and intentions. The results indicate usability for general operators while suggesting room for improvement in precise controllability. These findings provide field-derived evidence and design implications for socially deployable full-body android avatars.

This paper presents an immersive bilateral teleoperation framework for beyond-human-scale manipulators, combining motion/force transparency with enhanced operator embodiment through virtual reality (VR) and distributed haptic feedback. The platform integrates a full-scale industrial hydraulic manipulator, a 7-DoF haptic exoskeleton, and head-tracked visual feedback to reinforce operator agency and self-location. A force-sensorless adaptive controller incorporates an augmented human-robot dynamic model to address master-surrogate asymmetries, input nonlinearities, model uncertainties, and communication delays. Rigorous analysis establishes semi-global uniform ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop system. Extensive full-scale experiments demonstrate precise motion and force tracking with scaling up to 1:13 and 1:1000, respectively, and fixed or time-varying delays up to 150 ms. Coordinated 6-DoF pick-and-place and multi-axis contact tasks further validate system performance. A ten-participant user study supports system usability and indicates approximately 50% higher normalized embodiment scores with VR than with monitor-based feedback. These results advance intuitive, force-reflected remote manipulation at industrial scale.