This paper reports on Team Northeastern's Avatar system for telepresence, and our holistic approach to meet the ANA Avatar XPRIZE Final testing task requirements. The system features a dual-arm configuration with hydraulically actuated glove-gripper pair for haptic force feedback. Our proposed Avatar system was evaluated in the ANA Avatar XPRIZE Finals and completed all 10 tasks, scored 14.5 points out of 15.0, and received the 3rd Place Award. We provide the details of improvements over our first generation Avatar, covering manipulation, perception, locomotion, power, network, and controller design. We also extensively discuss the major lessons learned during our participation in the competition.

Real-time magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in-terventions are significantly impacted by material compatibility problems and size constraints in the MRI bore. Limited physi-cian access to patients within the bore of the MRI necessitates iterative positioning and imaging, which prolongs the duration of the procedure and increases patient risk. We present a passive MR-safe haptic teleoperation device for prostate needle biopsy inside an MRI machine. The device uses a low-friction hydrostatic transmission based on paired rolling diaphragm actuators, linear and rotary. The device has two degrees of freedom, allowing needle insertion and rotation. The robot produces negligible MR imaging artifacts, has effective positioning tracking, and can reliably detect needle punctures in the clinically relevant range. We describe the design components, system transparency, and perform a needle insertion test.

There has been a drastic shift to remote interaction for professional, industrial and personal interactions. Improving the overall quality of these interactions by removing any sense of distance between the users is the ultimate goal. Video conferencing has been widely adopted as an improvement to audio-only interactions. Having added visuals to audio communication, the next frontier is to add physical interaction to this remote communication. In this paper, we present an avatar system with the aim of tackling these necessities. The proposed system includes both hardware and software designs to ensure a real-time telemanipulation experience with tactile force feedback. We present a coupled hydrostatic actuated gripper and glove with high system bandwidth to reduce the inherent latency of the mechanical system. To account for latency over the network, the wave variable based method is adopted to maintain the stability of the closed-loop gripper control even under hundreds of milliseconds of delay. A bidirectional audiovisual communication system comprised of off-the-shelf hardware and software is incorporated to allow realtime conversation between the operator and the recipient for collaborative tasks. the proposed system has been validated in lab experiments and the global ana avatar xprize challenge semifinal.