  Robotic teleoperation is a key technology for a wide variety of applications.
It allows sending robots instead of humans in remote, possibly dangerous
locations while still using the human brain with its enormous knowledge and
creativity, especially for solving unexpected problems. A main challenge in
teleoperation consists of providing enough feedback to the human operator for
situation awareness and thus create full immersion, as well as offering the
operator suitable control interfaces to achieve efficient and robust task
fulfillment. We present a bimanual telemanipulation system consisting of an
anthropomorphic avatar robot and an operator station providing force and haptic
feedback to the human operator. The avatar arms are controlled in Cartesian
space with a direct mapping of the operator movements. The measured forces and
torques on the avatar side are haptically displayed to the operator. We
developed a predictive avatar model for limit avoidance which runs on the
operator side, ensuring low latency. The system was successfully evaluated
during the ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition semifinals. In addition, we performed
in lab experiments and carried out a small user study with mostly untrained
operators.
