Demo: Edge-centric Telepresence Avatar Robot for Geographically Distributed Environment
This work addresses the need for better telepresence robots in remote meetings and presentations, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing systems.
The authors tackled the problem of insufficient communication and interaction in existing telepresence avatar robots, which are often cloud-centric and suffer from network overhead, by developing a framework that combines cloud and edge-centric systems with a new communication protocol, resulting in improved robustness and efficacy for geographically distributed environments.
Using a robotic platform for telepresence applications has gained paramount importance in this decade. Scenarios such as remote meetings, group discussions, and presentations/talks in seminars and conferences get much attention in this regard. Though there exist some robotic platforms for such telepresence applications, they lack efficacy in communication and interaction between the remote person and the avatar robot deployed in another geographic location. Also, such existing systems are often cloud-centric which adds to its network overhead woes. In this demo, we develop and test a framework that brings the best of both cloud and edge-centric systems together along with a newly designed communication protocol. Our solution adds to the improvement of the existing systems in terms of robustness and efficacy in communication for a geographically distributed environment.