Responsible avatar development

BSc assignment

A robot avatar is a robot embodiment of a remote-controlled human. This is a relatively new field and the amount of developments and breakthroughs are rapidly increasing. Telerobotics can be applied to many different fields, for example in the health sector and disaster management. 

The development of robot avatars is on the rise all over the world. These new achievements in the field of telerobotics are just the beginning of what is to come in the future. Competitions like ANA Avatar XPRIZE only promote the creation of avatar ecosystems even more. With all these rapid changes in the field, it is difficult to have a clear overview of all the technological improvements that are being made.

For developers and other people in the field to work effectively, they have to have an insight into what new accomplishments have been made in this rapidly changing field. This also prevents unnecessarily "reinventing the wheel". Right now there is no central space where this information is gathered, this leads to either a lot of hours of research or potentially doing work that has already been done. This limits the potential of growth that is possible in the telerobotics field.

One of the ways to do this is is creating an overview showing critical masses, actors, relationships between them, patterns, components and more. To ensure that users can get the most relevant information for their project, the tool will become interactive, for example including filters to further specify the data shown.

During my graduation thesis guided by the Robotics and Mechatronics research group (RaM), I will make a start on creating this tool supported by literature research. The starting point of the tool content-wise will be a few of the teams that were finalists in the ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition. In case the tool is successfully created it will be published on the website of Avatars.