The ANA Avatar XPRIZE was a four-year competition to develop a robotic "avatar" system to allow a human operator to sense, communicate, and act in a remote environment as though physically present. The competition featured a unique requirement that judges would operate the avatars after less than one hour of training on the human-machine interfaces, and avatar systems were judged on both objective and subjective scoring metrics. This paper presents a unified summary and analysis of the competition from technical, judging, and organizational perspectives. We study the use of telerobotics technologies and innovations pursued by the competing teams in their avatar systems, and correlate the use of these technologies with judges' task performance and subjective survey ratings. It also summarizes perspectives from team leads, judges, and organizers about the competition's execution and impact to inform the future development of telerobotics and telepresence.
@article{arxiv.2401.05290,
title = {Analysis and Perspectives on the ANA Avatar XPRIZE Competition},
author = {Kris Hauser and Eleanor Watson and Joonbum Bae and Josh Bankston and Sven Behnke and Bill Borgia and Manuel G. Catalano and Stefano Dafarra and Jan B. F. van Erp and Thomas Ferris and Jeremy Fishel and Guy Hoffman and Serena Ivaldi and Fumio Kanehiro and Abderrahmane Kheddar and Gaelle Lannuzel and Jacqueline Ford Morie and Patrick Naughton and Steve NGuyen and Paul Oh and Taskin Padir and Jim Pippine and Jaeheung Park and Daniele Pucci and Jean Vaz and Peter Whitney and Peggy Wu and David Locke},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.05290},
year = {2024}
}
Comments
26 pages, preprint of article appearing in International Journal of Social Robotics