i-Botics Team Members co-authored the paper “What Comes After Telepresence? Embodiment,
Social Presence and Transporting One’s Functional and Social Self”. The paper is awarded the IEEE 2022 Franklin V. Taylor Memorial Award for Best Paper on the 2022 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC).
The paper discusses the future potential of telerobotics, and telepresence especially. The article is based on the experience of the past four years of research and development in this area by the i-Botics Avatar team, while participating in the ANA XPrize Avatar competition. Both social and functional aspects of the technology, as well as enriching technologies, like multisensory pods, are discussed and evaluated.
The team reached the finals of this competition and will compete with 16 international teams for the 10 M$ prize. The finals are held on November 4 and 5, 2022 in Long Beach, CA in the USA and can be followed online via https://www.xprize.org/prizes/avatar.
