Haptic Social Interaction for Avatar Robot System: Bilateral Interaction Control and User Experience evaluation

One of the research lines within i-Botics is telepresence (remote “being”) and telemanipulation (remote “operation”, “handling”). i-Botics is participating in the ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition. The goal of this competition is to create a telerobotics system that enables you to feel like you are in a different location, can interaction with people as if you are in the other location and bring your (dextrous) skills to this different location.

One of the challenging parts of this competition is to achieve “social touch” - the ability via a robotic system to touch someone such that both operator (the one controlling the robot) and recipient (the person on the other end) feel like you are actually touching.
In this project, an experimental setup is to be developed that allows you to remotely shake someone's hand and creates for both the operator and recipient a genuine experience.