A Cybernetic Avatar System to Embody Human Telepresence for Connectivity, Exploration, and Skill Transfer

This paper describes the cybernetic avatar system developed by Team JANUS for connectivity, exploration, and skill transfer: the core domains targeted by the ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition, for which Team JANUS was a finalist. We used as an avatar a humanoid robot with a human-like appearance and shape that is capable of reproducing facial expressions and walking, and built an avatar control system that allowed the operator to control the avatar through equivalent mechanisms of motion; that is, by replicating the upper-body movement with naturalness and by stepping to command locomotion. In this way, we aimed to achieve high-fidelity telepresence and managed to be well evaluated from the point of view of the operator during the competition. We introduce our solutions to the integration challenges and present experimental results to asses our avatar system, together with current limitations and how we are planning to mitigate them in future work.