My Being to Your Place, Your Being to My Place: Co-present Robotic Avatars Create Illusion of Living Together

Abstract

People in work-separated families have been heavily relying on cutting-edge face-to-face communication services. Despite their ease of use and ubiquitous availability, experiences in living together are still far incomparable to those through remote face-to-face communication. We envision that enabling a remote person to be spatially superposed in one's living space would be a breakthrough to catalyze pseudo living-together interactivity. We propose HomeMeld, a zero-hassle self-mobile robotic system serving as a co-present avatar to create a persistent illusion of living together for those who are involuntarily living apart. The key challenges are 1) continuous spatial mapping between two heterogeneous floor plans and 2) navigating the robotic avatar to reflect the other's presence in real time under the limited maneuverability of the robot. We devise a notion of functionally equivalent location and orientation to translate a person's presence into another in a heterogeneous floor plan. We also develop predictive path warping to seamlessly synchronize the presence of the other. We conducted extensive experiments and deployment studies with real participants.