Overview / Usage

"Avatar" is an American science fiction film by James Cameron premiered in the year 2009. The film is about humans from earth colonizing the planet Pandora which is populated by the local tribe Na'vi. Na'vis are a humanoid species indigenous in Pandora. To create trust the humans developed a system which makes it possible to incarnate as a real Na'vi. In the film Captain Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) slipped into the role of such a native of this local tribe on Pandora to accomplish one’s mission. With this very special human technology he was able to look and feel like a real Na'vi.

The goal of "Project Avatar" was to build a project where you can have such an out-of-body experience using off-the-shelf hardware. The idea was to control a robot at another location using full body gesture control. The teleoperator on the the remote is equipped with sensors to gather environmental data. Using feedback channels this data can be transferred back to the human controller.

The human operator actually should be able to see the world through the eyes of the Nao robot including the field of view in 3D. This is realizable by using RGB stereo cameras. Using tactile sensors the robot is able to send touch-events over the communication channel back to the human controller. So the controller can actually feel sensor based events occurring in the environment at the robots site comparable to force-feedback.

Our plan is to introduce the Intel RealSense camera for full body tracking and Intel Euclid as additional camera sensor to extend the senses of the Nao robot. The Intel IoT Gateway is implemented as well to transfer the huge amount of data seamlessly.

Collaborators