Humanity’s next challenge? Creating IRL avatars (Yes, really)

One day in the not-so-distant future, search and rescue workers could rush into disaster areas not on foot or in traditional rescue vehicles, but via a robotic avatar.

At least, that’s the vision behind the latest XPrize, which today announced a new competition that will award $10 million to the first team who’s able to create a functional robotic avatar by 2021.

XPrize is still hammering out the exact rules and requirements of what this will entail, but the basics are this: it has to be operational from at least 100 km away and user-friendly enough that avatars can be controlled without any specialized training.  Read more…

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