“The wealth of this world is not in the ground, it is around us.” With this quote from the James Cameron movie, Avatar, the world is optimistic about the arrival of new humanoid robots that can make our lives easier. We are not in Pandora, nor in the year 2154, nor are we surrounded by Na’vis, but science advances at a frantic pace that we hardly realize.
Is it possible to make the movie come true? X-Prizean organization known for its technological challenges, organized in California a robotics competition that summoned companies from all over the world. The aim was to publicly demonstrate the telepresence technologythat is, that an individual could manage in another space, without being present, using a robot powered by virtual reality (VR).
The winner was NimbRothe robot of the Autonomous Intelligent Systems group of the University of Bonn in Germany, which obtained for its project nothing more and nothing less than 5 million dollars. Of the seventeen teams that entered the “Avatar robot” category, the German model controlled with virtual reality headsets and exoskeletal arms was the winner.
Anousheh AnsariCEO of XPrize said: “NimbRo’s work demonstrates the remarkable potential of avatar technology to transcend time and distance and help address pressing human challenges, from access to healthcare to disaster relief”.
And it is that NimbRo performed a perfect test. In addition to demonstrating his physical abilities, he had to be intuitive in front of the more than 2,000 people who gathered in person and virtually.
NimbRo made ten moves in just under six minutes, half the time of the team that came in second place. Challenges included interacting with a human being, using a power drill to unscrew a metal panel, or retrieving items from a storage area. And as if that were not enough, in the end he started dancing!
How does NimbRo work?
It is made up of a robotic torso with two Panda arms, each one being able to carry a weight of 6.6 pounds. The head It is made up of a tablet and two cameras that rest on the shoulders, the latter being the one that broadcasts 4K quality video images to the operator at 45 hertz. In turn, the torso rests on a holomonic platform with four omnidirectional wheels that allow a mobility of 1.5 meters per second.
The operator issues physical and verbal inputs from a separate location to the robot. Through a HTCC Vive Pro headset operator’s eye movements are tracked and with two exoskeleton haptic interaction devices, SenseGlove, the slightest movements of the hand are captured. In this way, the finger joints of NimbRo’s hand move simultaneously with those of the operator.
All of that operator motion data and images captured by the NimbRo camera are transmitted over the internet. Ethernet (standard for local area networks for computers) and powered by one gigabit per second. If the operator moves, NimbRo moves in another physical space!
Now that the start of the World Cup in Qatar is approaching, it would be interesting to remember that precisely a German automaton called NimbRo beat Croatia in the 2018 Soccer World Cup for adult-sized robots; the Robo Cup.
The original design arose on the occasion of the Robo Cup 2017 held in Nagoya (Japan), proceeding this year competition 1997. Throughout the history of the competition there have been comical situations, but also an important evolution of the artificial intelligence and the robotics which shows that, just like chess, VR robots could play soccer.
Adult-sized robots must be between 130 and 180 centimeters tall, measuring in the case of NimbRo 135 centimeters and with a weight of 18 kilograms. The exoskeleton was made up of a few simple 3D-printed nylon parts. His vision is through a Logitech C905 camera with a field of view of 150 degrees, being the data processed with an integrated Intel NUC minicomputer. In just five games he scored 46 goals and conceded one.
