Analysis and Perspectives on the ANA Avatar XPRIZE Competition

TL;DR

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the ANA Avatar XPRIZE, highlighting technological innovations, judging criteria, and organizational insights from a four-year telepresence competition aimed at developing human-like robotic avatars.

Contribution

It offers a detailed summary of the competition's technical approaches, evaluation metrics, and organizational lessons, informing future advancements in telerobotics and telepresence systems.

Findings

Correlation between technologies used and task performance

Impact of rapid training on avatar operation

Subjective ratings aligned with technological complexity

Abstract

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.