🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses the challenge of establishing a shared sense of physical co-presence and effectively conveying nonverbal social cues in remote interaction. To this end, the authors present “Yui,” a highly realistic full-body avatar integrating a 55-degree-of-freedom anthropomorphic mechanism, expressive facial and gaze control, dexterous upper-limb manipulation, and a mobile base, supporting both head-mounted and desktop teleoperation modes. The system was deployed for the first time in diverse real-world settings—including long-term public exhibitions and educational exchanges—with a cumulative operational duration of 1,131 hours. Findings indicate that users consistently perceived strong co-presence, human-likeness, and clarity in emotional intent communication, confirming the system’s usability for general audiences, while also highlighting the need for improved control precision. These insights offer critical design guidance for the practical deployment of embodied social robots.
📝 Abstract
Remote communication technologies have become widely used; however, supporting a sense of shared physical space and conveying rich non-verbal cues remain challenging in many social interaction scenarios. This study presents "Yui," a full-body cybernetic android avatar designed to integrate operator-side immersive teleoperation with interlocutor-side human-like social signaling. Yui combines a 55-degrees of freedom full-body mechanism with a previously developed android head, facial expression and gaze control, upper-body and arm motion, hand actuation, and a mobile platform. It can be operated through either the immersive mode using a head mounted display-based interface or desktop mode using a webcam-based interface. We evaluated the system through three real-world deployments: a long-term public exhibition at Expo 2025 in Osaka, Kansai, Japan; a remote educational exchange between elementary school students; and a public interaction study with general participants. During the Expo deployment, two units accumulated approximately 1131 h of operation, demonstrating both operational feasibility and maintenance challenges. In the public study, both operators and interlocutors reported positive impressions of co-presence and willingness to use the system. Interlocutors also rated the avatar positively in terms of human likeness and the transmission of emotions and intentions. The results indicate usability for general operators while suggesting room for improvement in precise controllability. These findings provide field-derived evidence and design implications for socially deployable full-body android avatars.