Occasionally you’ll be invited to an event and honestly you just want to stay at home and do absolutely nothing.
We’ve all been there.
Well Toyota has built a robot that could give you the the best of both worlds: a full-body suit that lets you control your very own robot ‘twin’. That’s right, just send your robot companion instead and all you really have to do is mingle every now and then.
Now we’re going to go out on a limb here and say that solving our social laziness probably wasn’t the first thing that sprung to the minds of Toyota’s engineers when they came up with the idea of the T-HR3.
Instead this 5-foot-tall, 165 lb robot is actually a highly-advanced prototype. Toyota sees its humble human-controlled robot becoming the fire fighter of the future.
You see one thing that robots really struggle with is making the decisions that we as humans are remarkably good at.
By giving a human their very own robot avatar you can then place the robot in incredibly dangerous situations without then risking the life of another person.
Another great example is of course space exploration.
A team of astronauts could orbit a planet, send down one of these robots and then remotely control it using the T-HR3′s control suit.
So how does the suit work? Well once you’ve strapped yourself in the suit consists of a torque servo that lets the robot copy your exact arm movements. A force-feedback glove then lets you ‘feel’ what the robot is feeling.
Finally there’s a HTC Vive virtual reality headset to give you a 360-degree view of the environment around you.
Toyota’s investing over a billion dollars in advanced robotics and seeing the T-HR3 in action it’s already clear just how far we’ve come from the days of prodding Boston Dynamics’ robot Atlas with a broomstick.