Immersive Auditory-Visual Real-Time Avatar System of ANA Avatar XPRIZE Finalist Avatar-Hubo

Abstract

The need for real-time high-quality audio-visual systems skyrocketed with the advent of the ANA Avatar XPRIZE, a worldwide Avatar Robotic System competition. Avatar-Hubo scored 6 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">th</sup> amongst teams worldwide; due to its humanoid characteristics, an operator is able to embody the robot. Therefore through vision, audio, and motion, one may transport their presence to another location. However, many telepresence setups suffer from high latency and poor depth perception. In this paper, both the latency and visual acuity of LiDAR and dual-camera stereoscopic vision systems were analyzed for Avatar-Hubo’s ANA Avatar XPRIZE semifinals setup. This analysis found that the LiDAR camera significantly underperformed in terms of Mean Data Transmission Rate when compared to the humanoid’s newly proposed vision-audio system. Additionally, trials with 17 participants during several System Usability Scale (SUS) testing found that Avatar-Hubo’s real-time auditory-visual system produced effective depth perception, allowing users to determine object proximity.