With Arms Sprouting Out of Its Head, the HyQReal Puts Some Real Muscle Into Robotic Teleoperation

Researchers from the Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT) and Istituto Nazionale per l’Assicurazione contro gli Infortuni sul Lavoro (INAIL) are looking to keep humans out of hazardous environments — by putting them in direct control of a quadrupedal telepresence robot strong enough to pull a plane.

"Remote robotic teleoperation is becoming vital in numerous fields, especially in hazardous environments where human safety is critical," the team explains of its focus. "In these scenarios, teleoperated robots are deployed to perform tasks, reducing human exposure to potential dangers. The 'Robot Teleoperativo' project aimed to develop a novel, collaborative teleoperation hardware and software system dedicated to operating in hazard-prone environments, reducing risks to people's safety and well-being. It employed, developed, and integrated advanced technologies in tele-locomotion, tele-manipulation, and remote human-robot interaction."

The Robot Teleoperativo project began with work towards a 2017 paper on a collaborative robotic system for industrial safety and health, but has barely slowed since. The project has grown to encompass everything from a powerful hydraulic-based robotic dog dubbed HyQReal, unveiled in 2019, to a virtual reality interface linked to inverse kinematic algorithms and proprioceptive sensors.

The most recent work has seen the HyQReal robot, which in 2019 was shown pulling a 3.3 ton airplane, given two more limbs to its stock four: a pair of hefty robot arms, mounted at either side of the head, which gives it the ability to more closely mimic the manipulation capabilities of its human operator — in turn giving the human operate a closer feeling of embodiment in the remote robot.

"The ultimate goal is to develop intuitive teleoperation/telepresence systems […] using a new generation of robots, for interventions that involve locomotion and manipulation in unstructured scenarios," the research team explains. "This subsystem will adopt a plug-in architecture; a main computer shall be responsible for the communications between the PILOT station and the FIELD robot. The software, hardware, and communication interfaces for the different modules will be implemented in this main computer. The bidirectional interfaces shall manage the data flow for the teleoperation scheme between the PILOT and the FIELD systems."

The latest paper on the Robot Teleoperativo project has been published in the Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Telepresence 2024 under closed-access terms; earlier work can be found on the IIT website, with more information available in Evan Ackerman's article for IEEE Spectrum which brought the project to our attention.