Retargeting

Your arms and a robot’s arms are not the same length, and its joints do not bend as far as yours. Software has to translate between the two, the way a dance teacher scales a move down for a smaller student.

In an Inria-led teleoperation project, moving your hand 10 centimetres could move the robot’s hand only 5, because the system shrank the motion to fit the machine’s body.

That is why teleoperated robots often look human in the shape of a gesture but smaller and calmer in size.