Invited presentation by Max Schwarz and Sven Behnke, University of Bonn, Germany: The NimbRo Immersive Telepresence System Winning the ANA Avatar XPRIZE Finals
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Max Schwarz is a PhD student with the Autonomous Intelligent Systems Group at University of Bonn, Germany and led the technical development of the NimbRo Avatar system, which won the ANA Avatar XPRIZE. He is interested in robotic systems of all kinds and deep learning for robotic perception. Max received his bachelor degree in 2014 and his master degree in 2017, both in computer science at University of Bonn. |
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Prof. Dr. Sven Behnke holds since 2008 the chair for Autonomous Intelligent Systems at the University of Bonn, Germany, and heads there the Computer Science Institute VI – Intelligent Systems and Robotics. He graduated in 1997 from Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg (Dipl.-Inform.) and received his doctorate in computer science (Dr. rer. nat.) from Freie Universität Berlin in 2002. In 2003 he did postdoctoral research on robust speech recognition at the International Computer Science Institute in Berkeley, CA. In 2004-2008 Professor Behnke led the Emmy Noether Junior Research Group "Humanoid Robots" at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. His research interests include cognitive robotics, computer vision, and machine learning. Prof. Behnke received several Best Paper Awards, three Amazon Research Awards (2018-20), a Google Faculty Research Award (2019), and the Ralf-Dahrendorf- Prize of BMBF for the European Research Area (2019). His team NimbRo has won numerous robot competitions (RoboCup Humanoid Soccer, RoboCup@Home, MBZIRC, ANA Avatar XPRIZE). |
We present team NimbRo's winning entry to the ANA Avatar XPRIZE. We describe the individual components of the avatar system, such as telemanipulation, audiovisual telepresence, and haptic perception. We focus on new, previously unreported details, including detailed timing analysis from competition data, a user study conducted in our lab, and a number of lessons learned. We also discuss future research directions and challenges of avatar robotics and corresponding competitions from our perspective.