A team from FIM is the only Czech participant in an international competition. It is designing a robot called FIM Bot

“Everything started in 2018 when a certain student of the name of Jiří Šurýn came up with a topic for his master thesis based on an assignment derived from the ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition. We agreed on that very same day to sign up for the project, even though at first it seemed more like a student prank and a totally crazy idea. However, like Peter Diamandis, the founder of the XPrice Foundation says in his Laws: “The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea,” recollects Karel Mls, the team leader and a lecturer at the FIM’s Department of Information Technologies.

The aim of the competition is to develop a physical, non-autonomous robotic avatar system that enables the operator to see, hear and interact with a remote environment. In future, avatars will be expected to remotely provide healthcare services or deploy immediate response in natural disaster scenarios.

The ANA Avatar competition kicked off in March 2018 and should go on for 4 years.  Currently a prototype humanoid robot with the working name FIM Bot is being manufactured at the Faculty of Informatics and Management using a 3D printing process. “We will also have to develop a working feedback system for the human operator and then connect both parts – the robot and the human operator – in real time via a fast Wi-Fi connection, and then test and synchronize them perfectly… At the Night of Sciences, which is to be held in November this year, we would like to show the first version of our functional model to the visitors. We could not have wished for a better slogan for this year’s science festival – Humans and Robots - is just perfect,” Karel Mls adds with a smile.

The future avatar will be manufactured from a polylactic acid (PLA), a biodegradable material similar to polystyrene, which is made from plant starches, and one of the most popular materials for 3D printers, which will form the mechanical structure of FIM Bot’s body. The components will be put together with screws, bolts and glue. Almost 2 kg of printing filament, that is about 500 metres of material, will be used to produce one arm, which will consist in almost 80 separate components. The 3D printing alone will require at least 200 hours.

Together with the production of the physical parts, the team must also develop the software. “The actuators used for the movement of the fingers, hands or head will be controlled by Arduino scripts. At a higher tier, the system control will run on a Linux-based system (Raspberry Pi 4). The more complex algorithms and the machine learning and artificial intelligence aspects of the system will require the use of Python and will require the use of the university’s own cloud infrastructure,” Pavel Blažek, the project’s technical supervisor, explains.

The project does not just have the support of FIM UHK. It has also been included in SKODA Auto’s University Cooperation Program. “This year, we have been testing new waters in the area of financing, such as through the Gama 2 internal contest for applied research projects organised by UHK. But in general, we strive to maximise our fiscal efficiency, and look for other solutions that will get us to the competition finals with the existing level of support. Everyone involved in the project does so in their free time and for the thrill and excitement of working at the cutting-edge; students may also use the outcomes in their class projects and graduation thesis,” the main project coordinator concludes.