On the 8th of January XPRIZE announced that the i-Botics team has officially qualified for participation in the ANA Avatar XPRIZE. The ANA Avatar XPRIZE is a four-year competition to develop a robotic system that will deploy the presence of a human to a remote location in real-time, leading to a more connected world.
Part of realizing this presence in a remote location in real-time is a handshake between the operator and the recipient. The recipient will take hold of the qb soft-hand robotic arm and the operator wears the HGlove exoskeleton. It is important for the handshake to feel as realistic as possible; the “squeeze” is a very important aspect of this. With current hardware it is possible to let the recipient receive a handshake from the operator, but not the other way. It is currently impossible to let the operator feel the squeeze of the handshake given by the recipient passed on through the qb soft-hand to the HGlove. The assignment is to build a proof of concept that allows the handshake to go both ways between operator and recipient.