Duration: 24 months
Main ERC field: PE – Physical Sciences and Engineering
ERC Subfields:
- PE7_10 Robotics
- PE6_7 Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Systems, Natural Language Processing
- PE7_9 Human-Machine Interfaces
Keywords:
- Robotics
- Artificial Intelligence
- Telepresence
- Telemanipulation
- Exoskeletons
Summary
AVATAR is a research initiative aimed at developing a physical, semi-autonomous robotic Avatar system. The goal is to enable an operator to see, hear, and interact with a remote environment as if physically present. The system leverages emerging technologies in three main areas: remote thermo-tactile feedback for fine manipulation, robust teleoperation architectures resilient to communication delay, and AI-enhanced teleoperation paradigms for navigation, manipulation, and social interaction. The project will also assess the social acceptability and empathy level of the Avatar robot in human-robot interaction scenarios.
The project is divided into 5 Work Packages (WP):
- WP1: Project Management This WP focuses on the general administration of the project, including planning, progress monitoring, meeting organization, and reporting.
- WP2: Advanced Robotic Telepresence This WP focuses on developing the Avatar robotic platform. This includes designing the avatar robot, developing high-fidelity tactile interfaces, and creating a robotic telepresence architecture for high transparency in the presence of temporal delay.
- WP3: AI-Enhanced Shared-Control Telemanipulation and Navigation This WP focuses on using artificial intelligence to improve the teleoperation capabilities of the Avatar system. This includes developing a control architecture for remote shared control of the robot avatar, enhancing environmental navigation, and adjusting AI-augmented posture.
- WP4: Integration and Use Case Evaluation This WP focuses on integrating the various components of the Avatar system and evaluating its performance in different application scenarios. This includes intermediate analysis, demonstrator development, performance evaluation in remote telemanipulation scenarios, and assessing user acceptability and robot avatar empathy in social scenarios.
- WP5: Dissemination This WP focuses on disseminating the project’s results through various channels, such as scientific publications, events, and media. It includes dissemination via the internet and media, scientific dissemination, and strategic dissemination.
Key Components:
- Remote Tactile and Thermo-Tactile Feedback: For precise manipulation.
- Robust Teleoperation Architecture: For managing communication delays.
- AI-Enhanced Teleoperation: For navigation, posture control, and intelligent assistance.
- Human-Robot Empathy Evaluation: In social scenarios.
Advancing Knowledge:
Tactile and Thermo-Tactile Feedback:
- Development of innovative wearable tactile devices for transmitting thermal and tactile signals, enhancing telepresence realism.
- “Providing a complete sensory system that includes tactile and thermal properties is a fundamental requirement for telepresence.”
Teleoperation Architecture:
- Implementation of a robust bilateral teleoperation architecture capable of handling communication delays and ensuring system stability.
- “The TDPA approach ensures stability by dissipating energy, but this introduces a positional drift error on the slave side and high-frequency jittering in the rendered force on the master side, leading to a degradation of transparency.”
AI-Enhanced Teleoperation:
- Utilizing AI to improve autonomous navigation, posture control, and provide intelligent assistance during manipulation tasks.
- “Due to the limitation of sensory information transferred through artificial interfaces to the remote operator, considerable mental and physical effort is required from the remote operator to perform the required tasks.”
Empathy Evaluation:
- Assessing the Avatar robot’s ability to convey empathy and its effectiveness in social interactions.
- “Among the characteristics that can enable a robot to relate to humans positively and efficiently is human-robot empathy, where empathy is used to refer to the ability to share feelings and thoughts of other people and to take another person’s perspective to facilitate the social interaction process.”
Expected Outcomes:
- Fully functional robotic Avatar system.
- Innovative algorithms and models in teleoperation and AI fields.
- Evaluation of the social and economic impact of the Avatar technology.
Impact:
Scientific:
- Significant contributions to robotics, AI, and telepresence.
Technological:
- Development of advanced teleoperation technologies and human-robot interfaces.
Socio-Economic:
- Potential applications in healthcare, elderly care, disaster relief, and various industrial sectors.
- “Europe is considered a leading region in the robotics industry, with the highest robot usage intensity and scientific leadership in robotic cognition, safety, manipulation, soft robotics, with demonstrated impacts in many key industrial sectors (e.g., healthcare, agriculture, inspection, marine, mobility, manufacturing).”