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Susumu Tachi

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Susumu Tachi (born January 1, 1946) is a Japanese engineer and professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo who proposed the concept of telexistence in 1980 and has worked on virtual reality, robotics and haptics since then.[1][2] His laboratory defines telexistence as technology that gives a person a real-time sensation of being in a place other than where he or she actually is, and of interacting with that environment, which may be real, virtual or a combination of both; it also refers to an advanced form of teleoperation in which an operator performs remote tasks with the feeling of being inside a surrogate robot.[3] His laboratories built the TELESAR series of avatar robots, the TWISTER 360-degree autostereoscopic booth and, with Masahiko Inami and Naoki Kawakami, the "optical camouflage" demonstration of retroreflective projection technology that TIME listed among the best inventions of 2003.[1][4]

Tachi was the first president of the Virtual Reality Society of Japan, founded the International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence (ICAT) in 1991, and received the IEEE Virtual Reality Career Award in 2007.[5][6][7] In 2017 he co-founded the robotics company Telexistence Inc., which lists him as co-founder and chairman.[8]

Reviewed 4 October 2026. Checked dates, positions, projects, awards and paper citations against the Tachi Lab biography and telexistence pages, researchmap, Nikkei Science, the 2019 ICAT-EGVE keynote paper, the RoManSy '84 paper, Watson 1994, TIME, National Geographic, VRSJ, ICAT, IEEE VGTC, JST and Telexistence Inc. pages, and Crossref records for every DOI. About review dates.

Early life and education

Tachi was born in Tokyo.[2] He studied mathematical engineering and information physics at the University of Tokyo, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1968, a master's degree in 1970 and a Ph.D. in 1973.[1][9]

Career

Mechanical Engineering Laboratory and MELDOG

After joining the University of Tokyo's Faculty of Engineering in 1973, Tachi moved in 1975 to the Mechanical Engineering Laboratory of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) in Tsukuba Science City, where he directed the Remote-Control Division and the Biorobotics Division.[1] His laboratory biography states that from 1979 to 1980 he was a Japanese Government Award Senior Visiting Scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[1]

One of his first major projects was the Guide Dog Robot, known as MELDOG, an intelligent mobile robot to guide blind people, which he invented in 1975 and developed from 1976 to 1983.[1] The robot was described in a 1981 paper in Mechanism and Machine Theory on its basic plan and experiments with MELDOG Mark I, and a 1985 paper in IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering described how it communicated with its user through electrocutaneous (skin) stimulation.[10][11]

Telexistence

In a 2019 keynote paper Tachi wrote that he came up with the idea of telexistence while walking in a corridor of his laboratory on the morning of September 19, 1980. He realized that a robot only needed to reproduce, by measurement and control, the same images on the operator's retinas that the operator's own eyes would receive at the remote site.[12] With Kazuo Tanie and Kiyoshi Komoriya he filed Japanese patent applications applying the idea to an evaluation apparatus for mobility aids for the blind (December 26, 1980) and to a method of operating manipulators with sensory information display (January 11, 1981).[12] He presented the first telexistence apparatus, together with the concept, in a Japanese-language paper at the annual conference of the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers (SICE) in July 1982.[12][3] His first English paper, "Tele-existence (I): Design and Evaluation of a Visual Display with Sensation of Presence" by Tachi, Kazuo Tanie, Kiyoshi Komoriya and Makoto Kaneko, was presented at the RoManSy '84 symposium in Udine, Italy, in June 1984. It described a display that measured the operator's head movement, steered the slave robot's cameras to match, and showed the two images to the operator's eyes through head-mounted CRT displays.[3][13][14]

Tachi developed the concept independently of Marvin Minsky, who used the term "telepresence" in a June 1980 article in Omni; Tachi describes the two as very similar concepts proposed independently at almost the same time in the United States and Japan.[3] He distinguishes them on two points: telexistence also covers existence in virtual environments, and in a real environment through a virtual one, and it can use autonomous intelligent robots as avatars, whereas telepresence in his account refers to presence in a real remote place through a teleoperated robot.[3][12]

Telexistence became the guiding principle of MITI's eight-year national project "Advanced Robot Technology in Hazardous Environments," which began in 1983.[3] Within it, Tachi's group built a mobile "televehicle" giving a remote driver visual and auditory presence (proposed in 1985) and the first telexistence master-slave manipulation system, TELESAR (TELExistence Surrogate Anthropomorphic Robot), with which operators built structures from blocks; Telexistence Inc. dates the first TELESAR prototype to 1988.[12][15] Benjamin Watson, a Georgia Tech researcher who toured Japanese VR laboratories in 1993, reported in Presence that several visitors, although first-time users, used Tachi's system to stack small wooden blocks at the remote site, that Tachi had also designed virtual equivalents of the robot and laboratory, and that in one of his experiments a stereoscopic HMD gave the best tracking performance after direct observation.[14]

University of Tokyo

Tachi returned to the University of Tokyo in 1989 and was a professor in the Department of Information Physics and Computing until March 2009.[1] In 1993 his laboratory was at the university's Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST), and Watson described him as "a pioneer in the field of telepresence in Japan."[14] He led the national Priority Scientific Area study on virtual reality from 1995 to 1999, was sub-leader of the Humanoids and Human Friendly Robotics (HRP) project from 1998 to 2003, and directed the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) CREST project on telexistence communication systems.[1] During HRP his group developed a telexistence cockpit used to control a biped humanoid robot.[12]

Much of his later work aimed at "mutual telexistence," in which people at the robot's location also see the remote operator. In 1999 he proposed projecting live images of the operator onto the surrogate robot using retroreflective projection technology (RPT), and in 2005 his team built the TELESAR II mutual telexistence robot for the Aichi World Exposition.[12] RPT is a projection-based augmented reality technique in which images from a projector fitted with a pinhole, placed optically conjugate to the viewer's eye, are projected onto a surface covered with retroreflective material.[16] A 2003 ISMAR paper by Inami, Kawakami and Tachi applied it to "optical camouflage": an object covered in retroreflective material is made to look transparent by projecting the background image onto it.[17] In 2003 the University of Tokyo team demonstrated a reflective coat that looked see-through when viewed through a special viewfinder.[18] TIME named the system, credited to Tachi, Inami and Kawakami, one of its best inventions of 2003 and noted possible military uses and uses in aircraft cockpits to help pilots land.[4]

His group also developed TWISTER (Telexistence Wide-angle Immersive STEReoscope), a booth with LED panels rotating around the user that shows full-color autostereoscopic 3D images with a 360-degree field of view while cameras on the panels capture the user; the first version was presented at IEEE Virtual Reality 2001.[1][19] TWISTER later served as the control cockpit of TELESAR IV, a mobile mutual telexistence robot described at IROS 2011.[1][20] Other display work listed by his laboratory includes RePro3D, a full-parallax autostereoscopic display with haptic feedback based on RPT, and HaptoMIRAGE, a mid-air autostereoscopic display that up to three users can view at once.[1]

Keio University and haptic telexistence

In June 2009 the University of Tokyo made Tachi a professor emeritus. From April 2009 to March 2015 he was a professor at Keio University's Graduate School of Media Design and director of its International Virtual Reality Center.[1][9] He directed the JST CREST project on haptic media from 2009 to 2015.[1]

His approach to touch is the "haptic primary colors" hypothesis: by analogy with the three color primaries of vision, he proposes that the skin's sensations at each contact point can be reproduced from three physical components, force, vibration and temperature.[21] TELESAR V applied it; Tachi's 2019 paper dates its development to 2011, and JST gives 2012 as the year it was first developed.[12][22] Its avatar robot has a 53-degree-of-freedom body and limbs, and in July 2012 the team showed that it could transmit the texture and temperature of materials from the robot's fingers to the operator's fingers.[12] TELESAR V was shown in the SIGGRAPH 2012 Emerging Technologies program.[23]

ACCEL Embodied Media and TELESAR VI

From April 2015 to March 2020 Tachi was research director of the JST ACCEL "Embodied Media" project at the Tachi Laboratory in the University of Tokyo's Institute of Gerontology.[1] In his own account, the XPRIZE Foundation invited him to demonstrate TELESAR V at its Visioneers Summit in October 2016, where an avatar theme was chosen for the next prize; the competition became the ANA Avatar XPRIZE, formally opened on March 12, 2018.[1][12][3]

The project's TELESAR VI, completed in 2019, is a 67-degree-of-freedom anthropomorphic avatar robot (a 6-DOF torso, 3-DOF head, two 7-DOF arms, two 16-DOF hands and two 6-DOF legs) controlled from a mechanically unconstrained full-body cockpit. Each of its ten fingers carries force, vibration and temperature sensors.[12][24][3] According to his laboratory, he continues research on virtual reality and telexistence at the University of Tokyo's Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology and its Institute of Gerontology.[1]

Telexistence Inc.

Tachi founded Telexistence Inc. in January 2017 as a start-up from the ACCEL Embodied Media project.[1] In July 2020 the company introduced Model-T, a remote-controlled robot for retail that displayed products at a Lawson convenience store in Tokyo and has since been discontinued, followed by the TX SCARA robot in November 2021.[15][3] As of July 2026 the company's chief executive was Jin Tomioka.[25]

Professional societies and conferences

The founding prospectus of the Virtual Reality Society of Japan (VRSJ) is dated March 15, 1996. Tachi was the society's first president, and its list of officers shows him in that post from 1996 to 2000.[26][5] He started ICAT in 1991 and was its general chair every year from 1991 to 1999; ICAT describes itself as the oldest international conference on virtual reality and telexistence.[6] In 1993 he founded the International-collegiate Virtual Reality Contest (IVRC), a student VR competition.[1] He was a member of the IEEE VR steering committee from 1998 to 2017 and general chair of IEEE VR in 2001, 2002 and 2015.[1]

In robotics and measurement, he is a founding director and fellow of the Robotics Society of Japan, was the 46th president of the Society of Instrument and Control Engineers, and is a fellow of the Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers. He chaired the International Measurement Confederation (IMEKO) Technical Committee 17 on Measurement in Robotics until 2018.[1]

Writing

Tachi wrote the monograph Telexistence (World Scientific, 2009), which was followed by a second edition.[27][28] He summarized his telexistence research in "Telexistence: Enabling Humans to Be Virtually Ubiquitous" in IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications in 2016.[29] ACM's student magazine XRDS profiled him in 2015 as "the scientist who invented telexistence."[30]

Awards and recognition

Year Award
2003 TIME Best Inventions of 2003 (optical camouflage, with Masahiko Inami and Naoki Kawakami)[4]
2007 IEEE Virtual Reality Career Award; the IEEE VGTC lists him as its 2007 recipient in the series now called the VR Lifetime Achievement Award[1][7]
2022 Inducted into the inaugural class of the IEEE VGTC Virtual Reality Academy (49 members, ceremony on March 14, 2022)[31]
2022 First recipient of the VRSJ Research Achievement Award[1]

His laboratory biography also lists the IEEE EMBS Outstanding Paper Award (1983), IEEE VR Best Paper Awards (2001 and 2004), the Japan Minister of International Trade and Industry Prize (1988), the IMEKO Distinguished Service Award (1997), and the Japan Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology Prize and Governor of Tokyo Prize (both 2011), among others.[1]

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.00 1.01 1.02 1.03 1.04 1.05 1.06 1.07 1.08 1.09 1.10 1.11 1.12 1.13 1.14 1.15 1.16 1.17 1.18 1.19 1.20 1.21 1.22 "Prof. Susumu Tachi". Tachi Laboratory. The University of Tokyo. https://tachilab.org/en/members/susumu_tachi.html. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 "Susumu Tachi". researchmap. https://researchmap.jp/tachi?lang=en. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 3.7 3.8 "Telexistence". Tachi Laboratory. The University of Tokyo. https://tachilab.org/en/about/telexistence.html. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 "Invisible Technology - Best Inventions of 2003". TIME. https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1935038_1935085_1935990,00.html. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 "歴代役員一覧 (List of past officers)". Virtual Reality Society of Japan. https://vrsj.org/about/board/history/. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "About ICAT". International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence. https://icat.vrsj.org/about.php. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 "VR Lifetime Achievement Award Previous Recipients". IEEE Computer Society Technical Community on Visualization and Graphics. https://tc.computer.org/vgtc/awards/vr-lifetime-achievement-award-previous-recipients/. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  8. ↑ "Advisor". TELEXISTENCE Inc.. https://tx-inc.com/en/advisors-en/. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 Kazuki Yoshikawa (June 2019). "ロボット使う疑似体験 提唱から実用化へ (Robot-based virtual experience, from proposal to practical use)". Nikkei Science. https://www.nikkei-science.com/201906_010.html. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  10. ↑ S. Tachi, K. Tanie, K. Komoriya, Y. Hosoda, M. Abe (1981). "Guide dog robot - its basic plan and some experiments with MELDOG Mark I". Mechanism and Machine Theory, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 21-29. Elsevier. https://doi.org/10.1016/0094-114X(81)90046-X. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  11. ↑ S. Tachi, K. Tanie, K. Komoriya, M. Abe (July 1985). "Electrocutaneous Communication in a Guide Dog Robot (MELDOG)". IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering, vol. BME-32, no. 7, pp. 461-469. https://doi.org/10.1109/TBME.1985.325561. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  12. ↑ 12.00 12.01 12.02 12.03 12.04 12.05 12.06 12.07 12.08 12.09 12.10 Susumu Tachi (2019). "Forty Years of Telexistence - From Concept to TELESAR VI". ICAT-EGVE 2019 (International Conference on Artificial Reality and Telexistence and Eurographics Symposium on Virtual Environments). Eurographics Association. doi:10.2312/egve.20192023. https://diglib.eg.org/server/api/core/bitstreams/be5e5047-a7b3-4dc5-9619-2b7464d5d3d8/content. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  13. ↑ S. Tachi, K. Tanie, K. Komoriya, M. Kaneko (1985). "Tele-existence (I): Design and Evaluation of a Visual Display with Sensation of Presence". Theory and Practice of Robots and Manipulators (Proceedings of RoManSy '84, Udine, June 26-29, 1984), pp. 245-254. Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-9882-4_27. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 Benjamin Watson (1994). "A Survey of Virtual Reality in Japan". Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments, vol. 3, no. 1 (1994), reposted on arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19499. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 "About". TELEXISTENCE Inc.. https://tx-inc.com/en/about/. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  16. ↑ "RPT: Retroreflective Projection Technology". Tachi Laboratory. The University of Tokyo. https://tachilab.org/en/about/RPT.html. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  17. ↑ M. Inami, N. Kawakami, S. Tachi (2003). "Optical camouflage using retro-reflective projection technology". Proceedings of the Second IEEE and ACM International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2003), pp. 348-349. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/ISMAR.2003.1240754. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  18. ↑ Maddie Stone (2026-01-28). "How scientists are making the power of invisibility a reality". National Geographic. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/invisibility-science-fiction-reality-technology. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  19. ↑ Y. Kunita, N. Ogawa, A. Sakuma, M. Inami, T. Maeda, S. Tachi (2001). "Immersive autostereoscopic display for mutual telexistence: TWISTER I (Telexistence wide-angle immersive STEReoscope model I)". Proceedings IEEE Virtual Reality 2001. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/VR.2001.913767. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  20. ↑ S. Tachi, K. Watanabe, K. Takeshita, K. Minamizawa, T. Yoshida, K. Sato (September 2011). "Mutual telexistence surrogate system: TELESAR4 - telexistence in real environments using autostereoscopic immersive display". 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. IEEE. https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS.2011.6094543. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  21. ↑ "Haptic Primary Colors". Tachi Laboratory. The University of Tokyo. https://tachilab.org/en/about/hpc.html. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  22. ↑ "Realization of an alter-ego robot capable of transmitting haptic sensations". Japan Science and Technology Agency. 2016. https://www.jst.go.jp/EN/achievements/research/susumu_tachi2016.html. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  23. ↑ C. L. Fernando, M. Furukawa, T. Kurogi, K. Hirota, S. Kamuro, K. Sato, K. Minamizawa, S. Tachi (2012-08-05). "TELESAR V: TELExistence surrogate anthropomorphic robot". ACM SIGGRAPH 2012 Emerging Technologies. ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/2343456.2343479. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  24. ↑ Susumu Tachi, Yasuyuki Inoue, Fumihiro Kato (October 2020). "TELESAR VI: Telexistence Surrogate Anthropomorphic Robot VI". International Journal of Humanoid Robotics, vol. 17, no. 5, 2050019. World Scientific. https://doi.org/10.1142/S021984362050019X. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  25. ↑ "Telexistence Joins the NVIDIA Cosmos Coalition". TELEXISTENCE Inc.. 2026-07-16. https://tx-inc.com/en/blog/2026/07/16/12644/. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  26. ↑ "設立趣旨 (Founding prospectus)". Virtual Reality Society of Japan. https://vrsj.org/about/vision/. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  27. ↑ Susumu Tachi (2009). "Telexistence". World Scientific. https://doi.org/10.1142/9789812836342. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  28. ↑ Susumu Tachi. "Telexistence (2nd Edition)". World Scientific. https://doi.org/10.1142/9248. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  29. ↑ Susumu Tachi (January 2016). "Telexistence: Enabling Humans to Be Virtually Ubiquitous". IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 8-14. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCG.2016.6. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  30. ↑ Adrian Scoica (September 2015). "Profile: Susumu Tachi - The scientist who invented telexistence". XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Students, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 61-62. https://doi.org/10.1145/2810245. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
  31. ↑ "IEEE Virtual Reality Academy Celebrates Inaugural Class of 2022 Inductees". IEEE Computer Society. 2022-05-05. https://www.computer.org/press-room/2022-news/ieee-virtual-reality-academy-2022-inductees. Retrieved 2026-10-04.
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