Analysis and Perspectives on the ANA Avatar XPRIZE Competition

The ANA Avatar XPRIZE was a four-year competition to develop a robotic"avatar" system to allow a human operator to sense, communicate, and act in aremote environment as though physically present. The competition featured aunique requirement that judges would operate the avatars after less than onehour of training on the human-machine interfaces, and avatar systems werejudged on both objective and subjective scoring metrics. This paper presents aunified summary and analysis of the competition from technical, judging, andorganizational perspectives. We study the use of telerobotics technologies andinnovations pursued by the competing teams in their avatar systems, andcorrelate the use of these technologies with judges' task performance andsubjective survey ratings. It also summarizes perspectives from team leads,judges, and organizers about the competition's execution and impact to informthe future development of telerobotics and telepresence.