How soon, how good?
YOUR ROBOTIC AVATAR IS ALMOST READY in Spectrum IEEE By Evan Ackerman
What the Avatar XPrize revealed about the future of telepresence robots
ROBOTS ARE NOT READY for the real world. It’s still an achievement for autonomous robots to merely survive in the real world, which is a long way from any kind of useful generalized autonomy. Under some fairly specific constraints, autonomous robots are starting to find a few valuable niches in semistructured environments, like offices and hospitals and warehouses. But when it comes to the unstructured nature of disaster areas or human interaction, or really any situation that requires innovation and creativity, autonomous robots are often at a loss.
For the foreseeable future, this means that humans are still necessary. It doesn’t mean that humans must be physically present, however—just that a human is in the loop somewhere. And this creates an opportunity.
In 2018, the XPrize Foundation announced a competition (sponsored by the Japanese airline ANA) to create “an avatar system that can transport human presence to a remote location in real time,” with the goal of developing robotic systems that could be used by humans to interact with the world anywhere with a decent Internet connection. The final event took place last November in Long Beach, Calif., where 17 teams from around the world competed for US $8 million in prize money. ... '
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