Pittsburgh team advances to final round of avatar competition
Tech squad’s goal: Designing a ‘robot with personality’
In the future, robots could be tasked with completing a searchand-rescue mission in another country, building the next space station or constructing projects on the moon with their human operators seeing, hearing and experiencing everything that is happening while sitting in their office — a continent or even a planet away.
But right now, the researchers working on the first prototypes of this type of technology are building children’s puzzles.
The goal in this basic exercise is for the human and robot to feel as if they were working on something together, one step in developing technology that could ultimately allow people to use a robot to interact with a remote environment when they’re somewhere else entirely.
This type of tech could go beyond Zoom happy hours that make it feel like you’re drinking with friends and even beyond the immersive experience of virtual reality, said Billy Zelsnack, a roboticist from Squirrel Hill.
“It makes it so you feel like you’re somewhere else, unlike VR where you’re just inside a computer somewhere,” he said. “It’s as if you are there, not only from your perception but from the perception of someone you’re interacting with as well.
“Your personality is conveyed through this robotic avatar.”
In September, Mr. Zelsnack and his team, AvaDynamics, competed in the semifinal round — and later advanced to the final leg — of the ANA Avatar XPrize, a competition to create an “avatar system that can transport human presence to a remote location in real time.”
In other words, teams were tasked with creating a robot and software system that would let people feel as if they’re somewhere else, activating all of their senses.
“The goal of the ANA Avatar XPrize is to have teams create a robotic avatar that will enable an operator — a human operator — to see, hear, feel, touch and interact with a remote environment in a way that feels like they are actually
there,” said Colin Peartree, a project coordinator with the competition.
Ultimately, XPrize sees these avatars as being able to deliver life-saving skills to help with disaster relief, work on critical maintenance or repairs for various trade skills or serve as caregivers that can offer patients a human presence regardless of distance.
“The possibility of living in a world where individuals can provide aid during a crisis, in a different country, without ever leaving the comfort of their homes is closer than ever,” said Anousheh Ansari, CEO of XPrize. “These avatar solutions will solve real world problems and can bring people together in more ways than ever before.”
XPrize, based in Culver City, Calif., is a nonprofit that designs and hosts public competitions meant to push the boundaries of technology and advance research and development in ways that will benefit society. Along with its avatar competition, XPrize has focused on things like private spaceflight, carbon removal and environmentally sustainable alternatives to chicken or fish.
Teams from Pittsburgh have frequently been among the competitors in XPrize’s many challenges, including RoboTutor, an android app to teach reading and number skills in 2017, and CleanRobotics, an artificial intelligence system that sorts trash to help promote proper recycling in 2020.
Astrobotic, a North Sidebased lunar tech company, was featured in Google’s $30 million Lunar XPrize in 2016. And, Marinus Analytics, also based in the North Side, recently took third place in the IBM Watson AI XPrize for its tech that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help law enforcement battle human trafficking and other crime rings. Martial Hebert, the dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, is on the advisory board for the ANA Avatar XPrize.
That competition launched in 2018 and is set to culminate in a final round in the fall of 2022 with 15 teams competing to win part of the $8 million prize.
It is sponsored by All Nippon Airways, a Japanese airline that aims to connect people through air travel and hopes these types of technologies will help “connect more people around the world,” Mr. Peartree said.
Mr. Zelsnack first heard about the XPrize at an event at CMU but he didn’t come into the competition with the backing of the university or a startup in Pittsburgh. The team, AvaDynamics, was created specifically for the competition.
A stay-at-home dad, Mr. Zelsnack has a background in computer programming and game technology development. About 20 years ago, he “started getting interested in robots and now I’m completely interested,” he said.
AvaDynamics fluctuates from a group of six people to just two, and Mr. Zelsnack has spent most of his time working from his Squirrel Hill attic, printing parts for his robot from his home office.
At the start of the competition, it was difficult to explain to people what he was trying to create, Mr. Zelsnack said. Working from home? Staying at home and getting paid? How? And why?
Now, as the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed so many people to learn, work and socialize virtually, people get the concept, he said.
Eventually, Mr. Zelsnack sees the technology as expanding remote work beyond just what employees can do on a computer. He sees it being used to complete manual tasks, particularly ones that aren’t safe for humans.
Imagine working on technology and equipment for outer space, for example.
“You’ll be able to be on the ground and build the Space Station from the ground. As soon as your Space Station is safe, you can go into the Space Station,” he said. “Now we need to go to the moon, so you put a bunch of robots around the moon.
“It’s like little baby steps.” To get around the problem of needing a physical robot in the space that an individual wants to experience from afar, Mr. Zelsnack imagines robots will simply be everywhere.
One day, he expects they’ll be even more common than a family car — and significantly cheaper. So, when someone in the U.S. wants to check out the Louvre in Paris all they have to do is connect to a robot that’s already there.
For now, AvaDynamics’ machine and the other XPrize contenders are still working on simple tasks. Along with completing the children’s puzzle, the robots at the semifinal round of the competition had to give a toast at a mock business gathering and act as a conduit for a virtual visitor to explore a museum.
XPrize can’t release any details yet about what challenges to expect for the final round.
In the has meantime, taken apart Mr. Zelsnack his team’s robot, getting it ready for upgrades before next year.
He already has one detail on his checklist: the robot’s appearance.
Right now, it looks like a bodybuilder, he said, and is far more intimidating than it needs to be.
“There’s a lot of aesthetics related to it,” Mr. Zelsnack said. “I want to have a robot that somebody wants to come up and take a picture with.”