My research focuses on “What is reality for the human brain?” – how our world image and our self body image are reconstructed images in our brain, derived from the sensory and motor information that define human embodiment.

My lab develops systems for telexistence, which allows you to control a robot intuitively without the need to learn special skills by exploiting the complete physical association between a controller and a robot. In this technology, sensory and motor information based on the robot’s and user’s embodiments is translated to digital data, which can be recorded, and transmitted to each other to share their experiences. The technology can be available not only for interactions between a robot and a human but also between humans.

In realizing this system, we have proposed an approach for sharing first-person perspectives. We have developed the Parasitic Humanoid (PH) for the purpose. PH is a wearable robotic human interface for sampling, recording, and replaying the sensory and behavioral experiences of the wearer from the first person perspective in multimodal sensations and movements. Connecting PH wearers can realize skill transmission, telecollaboration, and sharing of experiences between humans.

In the skill transmission, the human frequently segments his or her behavior at significant breakpoints to teach others. We call such segmented human behavioral intention “Tsumori”. It has been proposed that a user controls a robot intuitively using a low DOF (degree of freedom) controller to manipulate a high DOF robot by matching the segmented human behavioral intention “Tsumori” and segmented robot motion. Because “Tsumori” is a kind of archetype of intention, it is available for intention understanding as brain-computer interface.