DEMO
Seung Hyun Kim, Ali Albazroun, Kimia Kazemi, Mattia Gazzola
Octopuses possess unique body plans that offer remarkable versatility and reconfigurabiltiy, for object manipulation or navigation through complex environments. This has inspired engineers to develop soft robotic systems that emulate the dexterity and compliance of octopus limbs. However, the automomous control of such complex, fully distributed systems remains out-of-reach. Human teleoperation provides an alternative route, although significant challenges perist as the octopus' eight highly deformable, continuum limbs differ fundamentally from the two rigid, segmented arms of the human body. This disparity raises a central question: can we map fundamentally different body-plans and enable intuitive human-in-the-loop control?
Immersive virtual reality (VR) offers a way to cross that boundary by providing rich real-time visual feedback that can help to re-program human intuition to unfamiliar bodies and dynamics, acting as a nexus between perception and control. In our demonstration, a person attempts to “become” an octopus by coordinating multiple slender arms, developing intuition for octopus-like bodies. Beyond robotic control, such xeno-embodied interaction may offer avenues for studying body remapping, sensorimotor adaptation, and human augmentation.