An Avatar Robot Overlaid with the 3D Human Model of a Remote Operator

Abstract: Although telepresence assistive robots have made significant progress, they still lack the sense of realism and physical presence of the remote operator. This results in a lack of trust and adoption of such robots. In this paper, we introduce an Avatar Robot System which is a mixed real/virtual robotic system that physically interacts with a person in proximity of the robot. The robot structure is overlaid with the 3D model of the remote caregiver and visualized through Augmented Reality (AR). In this way, the person receives haptic feedback as the robot touches him/her. We further present an Optimal Non-Iterative Alignment solver that solves for the optimally aligned pose of 3D Human model to the robot (shoulder to the wrist non-iteratively). The proposed alignment solver is stateless, achieves optimal alignment and faster than the baseline solvers (demonstrated in our evaluations). We also propose an evaluation framework that quantifies the alignment quality of the solvers through multifaceted metrics. We show that our solver can consistently produce poses with similar or superior alignments as IK-based baselines without their potential drawbacks.