TOCABI is a life-size humanoid robot designed from the ground up for research in humanoid robotics. The robot is capable of both autonomous control and being a remote avatar controlled by a person in VR. Unlike many of the animatronic robots available today, TOCABI is capable of walking and interacting with the environment in meaningful ways. This lets a user enter into a “virtual” space, which is in fact a real-world streamed to their VR headset, and with hand tracking and foot pedals, can remotely control the robot by moving themselves and interacting with their virtual space. The cameras and audio equipment let the user have conversations in real-time, with abstracted facial animations created from the live audio of the operators voice. This type of virtual-to-real avatar has some important applications, including remote-work and one day enabling people with all sorts of physical disabilities to interact with the built environment in new ways.

TOCABI stands for Torque-controlled CompliAnt BIped. It is 1.8 meters, 100KG and 33 degrees of freedom. The torque-control and compliance algorithms controlling the robot help make human-robot interaction safer by limiting the energy put into the motors to only what is required for the expected tasks. The design of the robot was a collaboration between New Jersey Institute of Technology and Seoul National University.