Abstract
Interpersonal communication is essential in social networking. People are communicating with one another not merely through verbal and vocal means. Nonverbal communication is actually more powerful than words in conveying messages, emotions, and feelings. This can not be fully satisfied by the traditional communication tools. Therefore, there is considerable demand for a new communication tool that helps to rebuild the face-to-face interaction and communication. For this purpose, a telepresence robot called TRiCmini was developed with enhanced interactions to enrich the interpersonal communication among people from remote places.The basic concept of TRiCmini is to use it as the avatar or agent of a person in a remote home environment. With the wireless LAN router located in the home environment, TRiCmini is thus connected to the Internet for data transmission. The remote user manipulates TRiCmini through the user interface on a laptop/desktop computer to freely move it around and communicate with the local user, who is staying with the robot in the home environment. In addition to the ability of traveling around freely, it is intended to provide both verbal and nonverbal means of interpersonal communication. Thus, TRiCmini is provided with human-like appearance, facial expression, and body movement. In this way, the face-to-face interaction between the both ends can be rebuilt as if the two users are being together in the same place.Based on the evaluation results with 60 subjects, TRiCmini demonstrates the extensive ability to rebuild the face-to-face interactions in remote interpersonal communication by means of multimedia interaction, omnidirectional movement, facial expression, whole-body emotion, obstacle avoidance and automatic navigation. With these features, the distance barrier can be overcome to help maintain satisfactory social networks between people.